Mr. Neale Richmond:

To respond to Deputy Byrne, the European Movement is a not-for-profit body that is staffed by three permanent staff, a number of part-time staff and volunteers. Our funding primarily comes from our membership. Individual members range from students to professionals and we also have corporate and institutional members. We bid for a number of tenders to the European Commission, Léargas and the Government to run various programmes in schools and run our actions. For example, we are the national implementation body of the Blue Star programme and receive an element of funding under the Department of the Taoiseach's block grant each year. I stress, however, that this funding has declined greatly in recent years. Those are the sources of most of the money used to support our actions.

It could take a little longer to answer Deputy Donohoe's question but I will try to do so in 30 seconds. European integration was very much a bottom-up initiative in which individual ministers from European countries, notably France and Germany, came together because they wished to avoid a recurrence of the devastation caused by the Second World War. The European institutions developed as a result of this co-operation and the economic success of the early European Coal and Steel Community allowed the European project to develop and become attractive to peripheral states such as Ireland and independently wealthy states such as Denmark, Austria and Sweden which realised they would be better off in the European project. Other states such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Norway realised they did not need to be part of the project.

The challenge is very much to the leaders of Europe to ensure the entity we know as the European Union does not become a top-down institution that lectures its almost 400 million citizens across Europe about why European integration is good. Instead, it should deliberately show citizens why it is good. It was easy in Ireland in the early 1990s to see the Structural Funds in action. One only had to take a spin in the car on the M50 to see the road was largely funded by the European Union. We no longer see this as evidence, which may be partly due to the way in which the media reports Europe.

There are more than 100 pages in the report but the media want to find the little slightly negative details as opposed to the vast number of positive aspects not only at the political level but at all levels. The challenge for our political leaders is to demonstrate it practically and vocally and not just at referendum time.