TWO senior Slovak officials have called on Ireland to ensure equal treatment by the EU of central and east European states during its presidency of the union.
Mr Peter Stanek and Mrs Jana Cerna, both economic advisers to the Slovak prime minister, maintain the EU is adopting a two tier approach to the new European democracies.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are being looked on more favourably as potential EU members, they say.
The two were in Dublin yesterday to meet officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of Trade and Tourism. Yesterday afternoon they gave lectures on the Slovak economy and their ambitions to join the EU at the Economic and Social Research Institute.
Slovakia, part of former Czechoslovakia, became an independent state in 1993. It was the less developed part of Czechoslovakia with a relatively narrow industrial base dependent on heavy engineering and arms manufacture.
Since independence, however, its main economic indicators have improved significantly.
According to Mr Stanek, the Slovak Republic's GNP growth rate has been better than in the other transitional economies - in 1994 it was 4.2 per cent and in 1995 7.4 per cent.
Inflation was 7.2 per cent and the balance of trade is in surplus. He acknowledges unemployment, at 13 per cent, is a problem, but maintains that the Slovak Republic has the most dynamic export growth of all the transitional economies."
Yet the new State feels it is not looked upon favourably by the EU as a potential early member. In 1989 when the central and western European economies began to transform their economies, they expected to be joining the EU within five or six years, according to Mrs Cerna.
But a recent European Commission meeting in Strasbourg approved 2010 as the earliest possible date for membership.
There is not equal treatment for all transitional countries, she maintains. "The EU has a different assessment of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary on the one hand and Slovakia on the other", she said, yet this is not justified by economic performance.
The EU has asked for certain economic reforms in Slovakia that are not, necessarily in the state's best interests, they say. Their privatisation process, for example, had been at a different pace than in other transitional economies, according to Mr Stanek.
"We have not engaged in selling our property abroad cheaply", he says. "We want foreign capital to come, but only for the long term advantage of the economy.