Dr. Karen Devine:

The Workers' Party, then Democratic Left and eventually the Labour Party. He was a Labour Party MEP. He stated that the future incarnation of CSDP would be a great thing and should be supported, but that he would only agree to its development if the European Parliament had co-decision powers. He was explicit. The Parliament has no say. Twice a year, it calls on Ms Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to give a statement, but it has no decision-making power. It does not even have the power of consultation. That is a major flaw.

Regarding the notion that the EU as a larger entity would, for example, counterbalance Trump in the USA and the fear of eastern European states, in which context Senator Bacik mentioned Georgia, consider the intervention in Libya, which was supposed to solve problems but created a situation similar to the one in Syria. The problem is that power politics have not left NATO and the EU. In whose interest is that? Several academics have analysed why the EU intervened in the missions in Africa. Professor Gorm Rye Olsen is one of them. After examining seven missions in total, he found that there had essentially been a gentlemen's agreement between the UK and France that the EU's foreign policy would only get involved in those areas of Africa that had been carved out as British or French colonies. They agreed that if either wanted to use the European Security and Defence Policy, ESDP, to do something in Africa, it would be okay as long as the other was allowed to do the same in respect of its former colonial states. Professor Olsen pointed to the good in these human interventions, but that strategic geopolitical interests rather than humanitarianism were the primary goal. Consider France in Chad, for example.

The French already had military there supporting the government in Chad and there was an issue. Even French NGOs pointed to the lack of neutrality in the intervention in Chad, particularly with French forces already being there. For me, we need to have a space where we can question the realpolitikand the real interests that could be at stake if the EU decided to develop this capability.

In relation to Deputy Crowe's questions, of which I counted nine - I enjoyed all of them - the Deputy is correct that there is too much in the paper. It is one of my failings as an academic that I always go on too long. The wider paper, hopefully, will provide more forensic evidence and detail on what I am trying to say.

I agree with Deputy Crowe on most of the points he made in that there is no evidence that the media is an activist for Irish foreign policy. I also noticed this, particularly in relation to The Irish Timeswhich has always regarded itself as "the paper of record". There was a journalist, whose name escapes me, who was always clear in his reporting. As a student in the early 1990s in UCD and in Limerick, I always followed his reports on what was happening at EU level in terms of European political co-operation and then, after the Maastricht treaty was passed and ratified in 1993, the notion of the common security and defence policy, and later the common foreign policy. He was always quite accurate and fair in his reporting of what was said and the possible implications for Irish foreign policy and neutrality. That ended around the late 1990s and since then I have noticed - I have done a lot of empirical analysis of this - that the journalists who are reporting at EU level are more like embedded journalists. They are no longer independently reporting. They are in a way rewriting what was said, not critiquing it or looking at it from the perspective of traditional Irish foreign policy norms. I cannot tell my students that if they want to know about Irish foreign policy or the European Union, they should consult The Irish Times, etc. I have to provide the documentary evidence. Even with textbooks on the EU, which I am always asked to review, I find I am always critiquing them because they give this depoliticised flowery picture of how EU politics works. I prefer to use the textbooks to teach how the institutions work but I provide my own analysis of both sides of the argument as to when the EU does good and when it has room for improvement, and I leave my students to make up their own minds on it. I give material from both sides, and that has been absent from academia.

Even Professor Giandomenico Majone, the European University Institute, EUI, pro-European Union academic I mentioned, when outlining the three operating strategies and principles of how the EU works, stated that academics have never critiqued these and they do not want to do so because they are all inherently pro-European Union. If one is studying the EU, one is pro-European Union. Such academics do not want to touch it because they are afraid that if they do, they are somehow undermining the European Union project. That is a problem, even if one is, as I have always been, pro-EU. It was why I started studying it myself. I did a masters in European integration in Limerick and I continued to study it; I teach it in DCU. I have been teaching it for over ten years at DCU, and prior to that in Trinity and in Aberdeen. The point is that one cannot suspend one's critical faculties. Deputy Crowe is correct in that regard.

One cannot really criticise the EU in relation to Iraq. It did not come up with a position because it was split along the traditional axis of CSDP, the UK versus France. France was very much against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US, seeing them as basically imperialist interventions. The UK decided the special relationship was more important and became part of the coalition of the willing. Deputy Crowe is correct when he cites the 100,000 who marched in Dublin in the anti-war demonstrations. In fact, I included that in the bigger paper that I will submit to the committee. There was not much leadership there. Just like the media, that is completely absent from Irish politics in the past 20 or 30 years. I point to some of those changes in the wider paper.

The third comment Deputy Crowe made was that Ireland has not used the veto and he asked why that is the case. I go back to the point I made to the Chairman on this notion of elite socialisation - the idea that Ireland was so eager to join the EEC. The first application was submitted in 1961, de Gaulle vetoed the UK's entry and Ireland did not pursue it. We submitted another two applications - three applications in all - and the third and final one was accepted. However, we were willing to sell ourselves, effectively sell out, just to get in. Partly, this was because of the organisation of domestic politics in Ireland in that one can see that the fishermen were not a strong lobby group and fishing was literally handed over to the EU, yet we did not give our land and our farming, which are really important to this island, over to the EU in that respect. We do not control agricultural policy; it is controlled at the EU level, with Ireland having a seat at that table. There were so many aspects, including our foreign policy aspects, that we were willing to set aside in order to join.

I can understand why, given that Ireland wanted to develop and was overly dependent on the UK. My problem is that we do not use the veto because our thinking has gone too far, and this is why I included elements of the Taoiseach's speech. In terms of our political elite, we are now so embedded in being good Europeans and on the side of the 27 that we have fundamentally lost what we are supposed to do and what other EU states, such as Denmark, do in terms of simply fighting for one's interests. When I teach students how the EU works, I explain that they should forget about the tabloid headlines one might get, in particular, in the UK, such as "Brussels is trying to control us", and learn that every piece of legislation passed by the EU has been passed with the support of member state governments because that is how decisions are taken. Every piece of legislation, whether it is a decision, a directive or a regulation, has to be passed by the Council of Ministers. The problem, for me, is that the EU, as it has developed, has given more power to the European Parliament but in tandem has also increased the involvement of qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers, which means that smaller member states can be outvoted or a coalition of member states can be outvoted on an important proposal. In a way, this is a problem of the democratic deficit in the EU that Deputy Crowe talked about. The notion of EU federalisation that the Deputy mentioned is, in fact, what is driving that - the European Parliament is a direct representative of the citizens of the EU and it should have co-decision standing with the Council of Ministers.

The Deputy stated that polls have shown that people oppose the democratic deficit and that trust in the EU has shrunk. One of the points I make in the wider paper is that when one looks at states such as Greece and Ireland that have, in a way, been hammered by the policies of the EU in relation to bailouts and resisting the vested interests that the then US Treasury Secretary, Mr. Timothy Geithner, was representing when he was trying to influence the EU decisions on what to do about, for example, the Irish banks or Greek sovereign debt, one can see the problem. In terms of the analysis of opinion polls - I have written a paper on this - trust and identification with Europe has completely plummeted among those member states' populations, the so-called PIIGS. This is in direct contrast to the member states which have emerged relatively unscathed from the financial crisis although the banks of France, Germany and the UK were just as reckless as Irish banks or Greek banks because the whole system is interconnected. I did not present it today, but I am using the analogy of how Ireland acquiesced to the vested interests in the output of the negotiations in 2010 over the imposition of the bailout whereas the leaders previously, from 1916 or even prior to that, would never have allowed that to happen because they had enough notion of Irish national interest to resist it.

A state such as Denmark which is used to using its veto and sees no problem in using it, that does not have this post-colonial mentality of having to please all the time, would not have let a similar situation happen. I have a lot of sympathy for what the member said about that.

On whether the EU institutions learned anything from Brexit, I wrote a draft paper on this which analyses the debate in the European Parliament immediately after the result of the referendum on 26 June 2016, when 52% of voters in the UK voted to leave the EU. Those European Parliament discourses were completely divided and in a worrying way. On the left, most MEPs said they could understand the result if one looked at the imposition of austerity that had been part of the EU's response to the global financial crisis. That is why I looked at the Eurobarometer polls in the so-called PIIGS states to see the effect on trust in the EU and identification with the European Union project. It has had such a detrimental effect. The MEPs said that Brexit was just another symptom of that, and they said that, as parliamentarians and part of the overall EU body, they had failed people in that respect and they should have done better. They said that this should be a wake up call for them, that they did not want another country to exit because of the EU's difficulties in handling these issues.

The other side of the debate worried me. This was the ideological problem I had, namely, the EU-vangelist, as one might call it, where there was absolutely no acceptance of the notion that 17 million people had said that they wanted to get out, that they felt it was not in their interests. There was no notion that maybe the EU had not done so well in the global financial crisis and the imposition of austerity, that maybe it could have done something different. There was no critical engagement whatsoever with the reasons people voted for Brexit. Instead, what they said was that it was an opportunity to go forward with further integration, to have a banking union and a fiscal union. Germany's Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, called for a European system of welfare, and he called for this before. They want to be able to concentrate power and put in more integration in policy areas where the EU is not currently involved. They want to keep pushing that. It speaks to Professor Majone's observation that the end result of European integration is not the point, so much as its need to keep getting more competences. That side of the MEPs debate was very worrying. If the EU continues to be blind to its flaws and refuses to engage out of fear - nobody likes to be criticised or attacked - it is that lack of critical engagement with self that I find particularly worrying.

On whether the EU institutions have learned anything from Brexit, half the Parliament has and half has not and its solution is to go further down the federalisation project route, which many member state populations would not agree with. I do not think it is the correct response.

There was a worry that when the British voice is gone, there will be an urge to go down the federal route and the question was asked as to whether there would be an acceleration of EU militarisation and would we, in Ireland, give up public statements on neutrality or would we no longer continue the pretence of neutrality. I wrote a paper looking at how Sweden and Ireland have behaved in engaging with EU military operations and it is worth noting the contrast. Sweden has gone for EU security and defence and full involvement in military operations. This is partly why it got involved in Libya, where Swedish jets engaged in airstrikes. Swedish fighter jets were involved in the conflict. The Swedish discourses were very much what the Irish Government would like to say but is not saying and has not said. Sweden said that it was part of its foreign policy identity and is what the country is about and it was doing good by intervening in this manner.

Sweden is a signal of where Ireland may go. The Irish Government still feels somewhat constrained by Irish public opinion, mainly because there have been so many referendums and because of the constitutional requirement arising from the Crotty case that there has to be a referendum on any new treaty that proposes further transfer of sovereignty from Ireland to the EU. I do not know if the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, will be the one to say it but the road we are going down is where we will simply give up public statements on neutrality. Sweden, Finland and Austria have. They no longer use the word neutrality to define their foreign policy, they use "non-allied". Ireland is similar in that it says that it is not about neutrality, it is always about military neutrality and that is defined as whatever the Government wants it to be on a given day. It is not embedded in international customary law such as The Hague Conventions of 1907 where one will find what a state has to be to be neutral in any future conflict. We will see an acceleration of EU militarisation with the UK gone. That is one of the dynamics that we need to understand. For those who want to defend the traditional norms of Irish foreign policy, Ireland does not want to get dragged into a big state-driven EU operation.

On whether the UK will prioritise relations with the US rather than the EU and how that might affect Irish foreign policy, it depends on who is in government. Tony Blair was one of the key individuals who, in a way, signals the demise of the diametrically opposed partnership between the UK and Ireland in trying to restrict further federalisation in the area of security and defence. He changed his mind after a meeting with Jacques Chirac in St. Malo in 1998, when they came out with this idea of a European security and defence identity. This was a huge change in UK foreign policy which had previously been against it. In her Brexit speech of 17 January this year, Theresa May said that the UK would still co-operate with the EU in foreign policy but the UK, outside the EU, is going to have a huge effect on Irish foreign policy.

We are suddenly going to become completely alone at the European Council table. The other neutrals have divested themselves of neutrality and are taking a more active part in military and training operations. They are more NATO-aligned than Ireland is officially. With the UK gone, Ireland will have to stand on its own feet without a bigger state reflecting its position, albeit for completely diametrically opposed reasons. That is probably the biggest thing that I have to say here. We have never used our veto. The Government does not particularly care about trying to hang on to those normative aspects of Irish foreign policy and the values associated with neutrality. The question is whether public opinion will put enough pressure on Government to try to retain those aspects of neutrality. I wrote my PhD thesis on public opinion on Irish neutrality while I was at Trinity College. Depending on the how the question is put, between two in three or four in five people in Ireland support neutrality and they do not want it changed. When they are asked if they would be willing to cede aspects of it in favour of an EU common security and defence policy they say they do not favour that. When one looks at opinion poll data for the reasons behind the rejection of the Nice treaty and the Lisbon treaty, the biggest substantive policy reason, other than that people did not know the contents of the treaty, was because they wanted to strengthen Irish neutrality. That is the dilemma that we will face.

The North and Brexit was raised and whether a special status for the North should be a priority for Ireland in the negotiations, and how that will pan out. There is a type of hybrid concept that could apply to the North. This is part of Tony Blair's discourses who wants to roll back the referendum result and does not want the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. The notion that a majority of people in Scotland and a majority of people in Northern Ireland did not vote for Brexit and that it was people in Wales and England who voted for Scotland has to be set aside because it is divisive. The UK is a union and I do not believe it will break up any time soon. There is talk of Scotland having another referendum on independence but Theresa May has ruled that out. The idea of a special status for the North should be one of the core priorities for Ireland. It is ironic that Theresa May made more references to Ireland in her Brexit speech of 17 January this year than the Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, did in his speech on 15 February this year. She explicitly stated that the UK has a long history with Ireland. She used the phrase "a special relationship" and said that the UK has to be careful to prioritise that in negotiations.

At the same time, we must look at Northern Ireland, the fact that there is an open Border and that Ireland, as an island, contains two separate states. In terms of European integration, with the UK being a member of the EU the hope was that relations between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland would improve and that economic integration would help lessen some of the tensions underlying the conflict. Money was put forward in terms of INTERREG programmes. The EU put forward small amounts of money to help with the peace process. It should be a priority for the Irish Government, as it is for the UK Government, to ensure that Northern Ireland is treated as a special case and that its needs will be fulfilled in the Brexit negotiations. However, my fear, and I refer to the comment by the Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, that we are on the EU side of the table and are one of the 27, is that it will be forgotten. We have to come at this from the national interest. It is the job of Ministers in the EU Council of Ministers and leaders of states in the European Council to defend their interests. I hope that will happen.