Professor Brigid Laffan:

Senator Reilly mentioned the decline in trust in European institutions. It would be extraordinary if that did not happen, as Europe is experiencing the most serious economic challenges since the Depression in the late 1920s and early 1930s. One would expect a decline in trust in institutions. With regard to attitudes in Ireland towards European integration, there is a solid core of support for Ireland's membership and the notion that membership is both necessary and good for Ireland. That was seen very recently in a RED C poll indicating that 85% of Irish respondents would remain in the Union regardless of what the United Kingdom did. It is the settled will of the Irish people and hard euroscepticism has much political leeway. I do not expect it to develop.

With regard to input legitimacy, the EU must become more responsive, and I argue that one way to do this is to marry monitoring and surveillance on the fiscal side to real social investment on the other side. I expect there will be rebalancing as long-term politics demand it. There was a question on running referendums again. There is always a democratic dilemma in running a referendum again; we have done it twice in this country.

In both cases it was done on the basis of an Irish Government asking for a mandate from an Irish Parliament. It was entirely democratic. One third of the Irish electorate voted in the first Nice referendum on a treaty that was more important to east Europeans than to us. It was absolutely right to ask us to vote again. The other member states saw the Lisbon treaty as being in their interests and wanted to ask the Irish whether this was their final answer. We are part of a larger system which requires our making these decisions in a very considered way.

In response to Deputy Byrne’s question on how Europeanised Ireland is, public knowledge of the EU is weak subjectively and objectively. When confronted with European issues we are like students who suddenly realise there is an exam the next day and we do a lot of cramming so that we feel comfortable with the subject. There is a real problem in communicating about the EU because most of the time we want the thing to work and we do not want it to bother us too much. It only comes to our attention when it is highly problematic, as it is now. There is, however, a real task to be done throughout Europe in political communication about the EU. It is not about the jargon and acronyms but about how this part of the world, which is very small, can cope with a highly globalised and shifting world. Europe has no choice but to hang together or it will fall apart, but we all need to debate and discuss what globalisation means and our connection with the wider world.

I agree with Deputy Durkan that party systems are under pressure, but I am also struck by how the centre is holding. Although there are challenger parties on the extreme left and right, this does not feel like the 1930s. We are not seeing the 1930s recreated. There are pressures on politics in Europe, but also because countries are faced with serious challenges of reform. The countries that are and will be prosperous are those that can adapt, adjust and reform. The countries that can do that will survive. For example, Spain has extraordinarily high levels of youth unemployment, but even in the boom it had a youth unemployment level of over 20%. In other words, it had a lousy labour market. Faced with a deep recession, the labour market freezes. Adjustment, adaptation and reform are part of what it means to live in today’s world. That poses a real challenge for politics.

Europe does not have a party system yet in the way that each country has, but there is no doubt that the European parties are coalescing and strengthening and we will see a shift in the next European elections. It has already been announced that they will be led by someone whom they will propose as the next President of the European Commission. There will be manifestos. I do not expect the next European elections to be transformational. Everything in Europe happens in a slow-drip, incremental way and this is no different. There is a drift from diplomacy to politics in the EU. It is becoming much more like a political system than a diplomatic inter-state system. That shift interacts and intersects differently with each country. Some countries and peoples are more comfortable with it than others.