THE WEEK IN STRASBOURG:THE EUROPEAN Parliament was told on Wednesday last that there was once a zoo where the lion lay down with the lamb. When the director of the zoo asked how this was done, he said all that had to be done was to find a new lamb every day.
The speaker was Sir Jonathan Sacks, chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, who spoke to parliament as part of the celebrations of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.
With French president Nicolas Sarkozy absent this week, the rabbi stood head and shoulders over any other speaker in the chamber during a rather lacklustre week which focused mainly on agriculture policy and the world economic crisis.
His basic message was not talk to extremists and make heroes of moderates by empowering the moderates and marginalising the extremists , but he delivered his message with style and humour.
Tuesday evening was devoted to money when parliament discussed the financial and economic crisis in light of the Washington G-20 summit.
French European affairs minister Jean-Pierre Jouyet said that the crisis was the worst since 1929 and the European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said that the G20 meeting "marked a new era in collective steering of the global economic crisis and has made people realise that we need a global approach".
During the debate, Labour's Dublin MEP Proinsias De Rossa stated that it was not the bankers or the right-wing politicians who were losing their jobs, their homes and savings and he managed to land a verbal uppercut on Fianna Fáil.
"My Irish colleague Brian Crowley has said here today that it's the banks' fault that we are in the mess we are in.
"He blames bankers for acting like bankers, and seeking to maximise short-term profit to the limits of the law.
"The fact is that it is politicians on the right who have systematically weakened the law to enable them to act as they did," he said.
We also heard a call on the British government from Gay Mitchell, the Dublin FG MEP, asking it to consider again joining the euro as its membership of the currency would give strength and purpose to a collective European effort, a call which was supported by British Conservative MEP, Christopher Beazley.
It did not go unnoticed during the discussions on the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy on Tuesday and Wednesday that had Ireland voted for the Lisbon Treaty, the parliament would not just have been offering an opinion on the issues, but would have been part of the decision process.
There were sour words between Mairéad McGuinness, Leinster MEP and Liam Aylward, who had suggested that there would be no support for a new Lisbon vote if farmers continued to be over regulated in the way they are.
She expressed anger that support for the treaty should be conditional.
But Dublin came up in a different and less contentious way when MEPs pressed the commission to ensure that the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CMM) agreed in Dublin, be signed by all countries.
Fine Gael MEP for Ireland South, Colm Burke, called on all countries to sign, ratify and implement the convention at the earliest opportunity and this was supported by Seán Ó Neachtáin, MEP Ireland West, who said that Irish people were very proud of the commitment by the Irish Government to it.
While it was not discussed in parliament, the parliament's constitutional committee called on the December European Council to reach an agreement that would allow Ireland to ratify the Lisbon Treaty in spring next year.
It said that the citizens of Europe would be deprived of new democratic rights if the treaty was not ratified before the June elections and that the majority of Ireland's concerns could be met without amending the text already ratified by 24 member states.
The committee, which voted by 16 votes for and six against, called on the Irish Government to put forward proposals to resume ratification.
"There is no plausible reason why a second referendum in Ireland should be easier to win after the European elections than before," said Jo Leinen, the German socialist MEP, who drafted the report for the committee.