Professor Gary Murphy:

I thank the committee for the invitation to address it. It is always a great honour to be in the Houses of the Oireachtas. I am happy to be here in my capacity as a professor of politics at Dublin City University. I do not propose to read out the opening statement which I submitted but rather to allude to parts of it.

The decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union represents not simply a profound shock but a real and deep crisis point for the European integration project. Since its creation in 1951 with the Treaty of Paris and, six years later, the Treaty of Rome, the EU has been inspired by the idea of ever-closer union. To all intents and purposes, that has clearly been sundered. Brexit has shattered that illusory idea and the UK's departure from the EU has revealed deep flaws that cut through the European Union's constitutional fabric. It has challenged our constitutional understanding of the European project. I do not consider the European Union to be simply an entity; rather, I consider it to be a project which has brought peace and stability to the continent.

Brexit represents in many ways the greatest crisis since the Union was founded. Brexit is tied up with wider issues in the European Union and in Europe itself. We have seen the rise of nationalism which is still a potent force in British and European politics. The results of the French presidential election show that. Brexit shows it. The presidential election in the United States of America also shows it, as does the rise of nationalist parties across the Continent who wish to sunder their countries from EU. This presents a significant problem for the Union.

The decision by Britain to leave may represent a timely window for us as Europeans to rethink the foundations of the EU. I consider myself ardently pro-Europe but even the most ardent pro-Europeans cannot deny the state of the EU is not strong. It has bumped from one crisis to the next, sometimes at the very risk of its own survival. The euro crisis has challenged the stability of the EMU. The migration crisis has put the Schengen free movement zone under pressure and additional challenges in internal security, external trade and defence have put the EU under pressure on other fronts. These challenges, which my colleague might be more disposed to talk about, expose the limits of the constitutional set-up of the Union. We have seen nationalist parties and policy-makers across the Union call for a reform of the EU's powers and institutional architecture with the aim of strengthening the Union and relaunching the project.

The euro crisis has exposed the weakness of the EMU. States, notably in the south of Europe, as well as Ireland, have suffered from a constitutional regime that prioritises fiscal stability at the price of growth and employment. The migration crisis has revealed the deficiencies in the fields of justice and immigration. It has displeased states in the north of Europe which have had to shoulder a greater burden in the management of asylum claims. States, especially in central and eastern Europe, are concerned that the EU is not able to sufficiently protect them from external military threats, particularly in the light of what might be seen as the United States Administration's distancing from those issues.

The European Union needs to avoid at all costs the idea of a multi-speed Europe where different member states progress at different rates. It will be all the more apposite if efforts to reform the constitutional architecture of the EU and the Brexit negotiations do not go as well as we hope for potentially idiosyncratic national reasons. The Union has developed at different speeds. Various countries have opted out of Schengen, the common currency and the Charter of Fundamental Rights. A number of states have enhanced co-operation to set up a unified patent court and another ten eurozone countries are discussing the introduction of a financial transaction tax.

Nobody should be in any doubt that Europe and the Union will be weakened by Britain leaving the EU. Britain has been disengaged from the EU’s common foreign and security policy and external action programmes. Brexit will also deal a major blow to the European defence architecture when the EU’s biggest army leaves the EU’s structures and when the important link that Britain forms between the United States and European pillars of the transatlantic security community ends.

Ireland needs to be at the heart of ensuring changes to the EU’s architecture are appropriate because the potential consequences of Brexit for Ireland are stark. Our commitment to the European project should be reassessed. It should never be taken for granted. Those of us who count ourselves as ardently pro-European need to take that into account. Trade with Britain is an essential part of our economy and the doubts about what will happen to the Border remain questions of conjecture until the discussions get well under way and ultimately are concluded.

This brings us to the question of the Northern Ireland peace process. I am not as pessimistic as some that Brexit will mean the inevitable return to some sort of conflict. The conflict has been over for the guts of two decades. There seems to be no willingness for dissidents to engage. There will always be dissidents as long as the country is not united and I would suggest even if the country is united those dissidents would remain dissident. The peace process is premised on all-Ireland co-operation and integration, an open border, explicit EU mentions, the European Convention of Human Rights and supranational protections. It is open-ended and continues to have a dynamic of change which is at risk from Brexit because it potentially disrupts North-South integration, turns Northern Ireland more towards United Kingdom, slows dynamic change and ultimately weakens human rights protections. More than anything else it probably offers a powerful physical and symbolic target for anti-peace process dissidents to label the process as a failure, which it clearly is not, which we all know and are grateful for.

For Northern Ireland a hard land border would be the worst possible outcome because it would bring economic disruption to a weak economy, which is in many ways based on the subvention it gets from the British state. It would run the risk of fortifying security infrastructure which would almost inevitably be attacked by dissidents and then reinforced. It would be a powerful symbol of reversal and failure and ultimately bring disruption to the premise of the peace process. It would also conflict with other dynamics. In 2017 we saw the first ever Northern Ireland Assembly election where traditional unionists are in a minority and where there is a clear strong majority for remaining in the EU. In that context, it is imperative that the Irish State and people remain, as we have been for many decades, a driving force at EU level in providing a calm voice within the 27 when the terms of Brexit are being agreed.

We hosted a major conference on Brexit in Dublin City University a few weeks ago which was addressed by the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Charles Flanagan. He outlined in a keynote address this is not a time for the EU to punish Britain. Rather, we in Ireland should seek to ensure Britain continues to play a role in Europe’s economic and foreign policy. We can do this through our negotiating team at EU level and also in our bilateral negotiations with the British. We should not forget that Ireland had significant links with the British state long before we both entered the EEC in 1973. We continue to have significant relations which have improved since the peace process was cemented and we see them in the current visit by Prince Charles. We should not forget that in the bilateral negotiations we have the power to persuade the British and we should concentrate as much on that as on our negotiations with the 27.