Ms Ann Cahill:

Many of the points being made amount more or less to the same point. Democratic accountability was referred to. This is something politicians invented to try to explain to themselves what the hell was going wrong because they did not understand. I suspect they did not understand representative democracy either. How far down the line does one go? The Taoiseach is not directly elected by the people but he is still considered to be democratically elected. He is elected by the people we elect but it is much the same in Europe. The Commission is highly politicised and one cannot do anything about that. Whether there are six or 26 members, it is highly politicised and unless one invents a whole new system, which is not going to happen, that is the way the cookie crumbles. That is why we need some other form of leverage. We will never have the leverage of a big country. If one wants to have such leverage one should go to live in Germany and then one would have it.

Reference was made to vision. I am pleased the committee picked up on that because no one ever picks up on it, but I believe it is food and drink to Irish people. For some reason, perhaps because there is only 14% of women representing us, this gets lost. People think it is some type of sissy thing that we cannot afford but that is so stupid. It is what we are, it is our identity. We cannot go back to the vision for Europe after the war. These are different times and no one remembers it. In the winter one cannot recall what the sun feels like and in peacetime one cannot remember what war feels like.

This has to do with identity as well. We have lost our identity, partly because politicians have forgotten what they are and who they are. They need to make up their minds. Are they here to service the princes of capitalism or the citizens? There is no point in telling me that a rising tide lifts all ships. That is rubbish and we know that it does not. Politicians need to make up their minds about that. They have made up their mind in London. Britain has decided to serve the square mile around the city of London and no one else seems to be paid any attention. That is the position.

Is the EU crisis deepening? Yes, of course. It will not get any better. Poverty levels are going up no matter which way one looks at them. One need only look across the board to see how one country compares to another to see that it makes no sense. If one is in a downward spiral then one is in a downward spiral and what is bad now will get worse. However, this is understood by Angela Merkel, for example, who realises that the only way out of this is to get in deeper. This means deeper integration, deeper economic integration and above all deeper political integration. We cannot resolve our economic difficulties within the eurozone without deeper political integration. For the Germans and many other northerners it is about trusting and understanding us. Senator Burke referred to the fact that they take us at our word. They do not any more but they did once. It is about us developing a new persona.

I am unsure what it was about but I remember something happening at the UN when I was a child. The committee members may remember it as well. An Irish person stood up at the UN and the whole world went mad and thought we were wonderful. Guess what? We thought we were wonderful. We found an identity by being the honest broker and by not being afraid to be the party on the margins taking an ethical stand and insisting on it. This is where we must go back to.