There was sorrow, fatigue and frustration in the voice of Dimitris Avramopoulos on Thursday night.
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"We are here again," the European commissioner for home affairs said, after an extraordinary meeting of Europe's security and justice ministers in Brussels. The last such meeting was after November's Paris attacks.
The Brussels attacks were a shock but "unfortunately they did not come as a surprise", he said.
"Every time we come together after such attacks we repeat ourselves. Words and commitments mean very little if they are not acted upon.
"Citizens are tired and scared. Something needs to change."
Some in Europe are looking across the Atlantic and calling for a European "Patriot Act" – even asking if Europe needs its own Guantanamo.
European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has started musing about a "security union", to combine and centralise intelligence and security services just as the EU edged towards fiscal union after the euro crisis.
But while Europe has generally agreed it wants "ever-closer union", intelligence and security is almost always kept off the table.
The Paris and Brussels attacks are replete with examples where information failed to cross a border to where it was needed: Islamic State fighters returned from Syria to Greece or the Netherlands, for example, to avoid arrest in their home country where authorities would be aware of the new danger they posed.
Avramopoulos has a laundry list of intelligence-sharing failures: police forensic data sits in "black boxes" invisible even between national agencies, the Schengen border database has been deliberately throttled for political reasons, the Interpol database of stolen and lost travel documents is "inconsistent and full of gaps", he said.
"There is a lack of trust, otherwise [attacks] might be predicted and prevented," he said.
Fabian Zuleeg, head of the European Policy Centre in Brussels, agrees the lack of trust between European security services is a problem.
"After terror attacks in the past, even including Paris, as soon as the issue is off the news agenda, the political momentum gets lost," he says.
The political mood on the continent at the moment is the opposite of integrationist – with the east mistrustful of the west, the south resentful of the north, and Britain threatening to throw in the towel altogether.
Europe is seeing a rise in populist, right-wing parties, most of them bitterly resistant to ceding power to the EU.
"I would expect that we see some actions on a bilateral level and the European level," Zuleeg says. "But whether it will lead to a step change in how we deal with these issues, I'm quite sceptical.
"As soon as the memories of these horrific attacks fade again I think we will be very quickly back to discussion about national prerogatives, national systems and very little impetus to co-operate."
One step forward that appears achievable is a continent-wide Passenger Name Record for air travel: previously resisted by the European Parliament on privacy grounds.
Avramopoulos says many other pieces of the puzzle are in place: the Europol agency, for example. They just require commitment and resources.
But there are problems at a national level as well.
Zuleeg says it is no coincidence that Belgium has been the focus of IS action in Europe. Here Islamists have exploited disaffection, the lack of integration of parts of the Muslim communities – especially in Brussels which has one of the highest unemployment rates for young people in the EU.
Though more IS fighters have travelled to Syria from Germany, Britain or France than from Belgium, the latter country's small size makes it top the poll for the highest number of fighters per capita.
A report by the Soufan Group in December said Brussels' Molenbeek district was a "well-established incubator and radiator of extremist behaviour", a hotbed of IS recruitment on a par with Libya's Derna or Tunisia's Ben Gardane.
"Areas where there are close-knit groups of susceptible youth, often lacking a sense of purpose or belonging outside their own circle, have proved to generate a momentum of recruitment that spreads through personal contacts," the report said.
This should be an opportunity as well as a challenge – a clean-up of Brussels terror cells would benefit the whole continent.
But Belgium is hampered by deep political and cultural divisions.
The country is notoriously hard to govern: riven by a political gulf between the Flemings and Walloons, it took 541 days to form a government after the 2010 election (a world record).
Three days before the Paris attacks in November, Belgium's Interior Minister Jan Jambon said Belgium's overly complex government had made exchanging information between police and intelligence services difficult: Brussels alone has six police departments and 19 mayors.
Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens offered his resignation on Thursday (it was refused). That evening he said he shared the scepticism over whether, this time, action would follow words.
However, he urged optimism.
"Do not despair," he said. "Do believe that Europe always, again and again, finds its way to solutions."
