Neale Richmond (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to welcome the ambassador, not just as a proud member of the committee but also as the convenor of the French-Irish parliamentary friendship group, something I hope will develop even further in the coming weeks and months. The reason I hope that develops further and I hope we have more of these engagements is that closer Franco-Irish relations are absolutely vital in the post-Brexit era. For so long we were that friendly country behind the UK. We are no longer that country. We need to work more closely with all our continental partners, but particularly France, a country which we have such a lengthy history with both culturally and socially. There are many key areas where there are opportunities for co-operation between France and Ireland in the next few years. First among those has to be the Brexit negotiations. It is absolutely vital that the European side, behind former French Minister Michel Barnier, remains united. I absolutely reject suggestions made by certain political leaders over the weekend that the Irish Government should circumvent that process and go directly to Whitehall, or 10 Downing Street. That goes against the good faith of the Brexit negotiations that was agreed by all 27 remaining member states. Ultimately, if the Irish Government were to proceed with that, it would only create more bad faith among the remaining member states. That would be highly detrimental to us going forward, so I hope that we can continue with this united approach.

However, there are other key areas that we can remove from the Brexit debate and I want to move on from that. First and foremost, a key area of co-operation is energy security. The Celtic interconnector between France and Ireland is vital. I am really hopeful that the foreshore licence for the landing in Cork can be granted quite soon. Both EirGrid and Réseau de transport d'électricité, Rte, are working very closely on that. The Irish Government cannot stress enough how important we believe that is and how much the continued support of the French Government, although there is competition with sites in the UK, would mean to us and how much it would allow us to continue to stay committed within Europe, knowing that we have that level of energy security coming from the Continent.

I will go into some of the points His Excellency raised on behalf of President Macron in a second. The reform of the CAP is of vital interest. Ireland and France have a continued close relationship in this area since Ireland joined in the 1970s. It is something the great Irish taoisigh who embraced the European project, both Garret FitzGerald and Charles Haughey, were very keen to push during the 1980s and it stood to Ireland, Europe and France. I hope reform can be continued, making sure that food security, food safety and food quality is maintained as well as ensuring that our producers get the prices they deserve and that we look cautiously toward the Mercosur region when that trade deal is agreed.

I have mentioned the cultural ties, the depth of which do not need to be repeated, especially the historical ones. One aspect tying into what President Macron said in regard to the youth of Europe and developing the linguistic abilities and the educational abilities is promoting programmes that exist like ERASMUS+. I have very few regrets in life but one I have is that I turned down the opportunity to do ERASMUS in Toulouse in 2003. I would like to think that I made up for it by travelling ridiculously extensively during my student years and doing a stage in Brussels but it is something that still gnaws away at me. My friends who did it are the ERASMUS generation. Some of them met their wives or husbands and some of them have a level of fluency in the language of the country they visited. It is that immersion and exposure that will allow that linguistic skill to be developed. France is the country that Irish students go to the most. It is something that needs to be maintained. However, Ireland is underperforming. Our third level institutions need to be a lot more proactive with their French counterparts, looking at the various institutions where projects' work can be combined. In my previous life on the Committee of the Regions I visited Le Mans and the university there to look at a really in-depth project in relation to energy supply when it comes to heating and the use of sound. That was a Horizon 2020 funded project. The Government has welcomed the fact that we have drawn down €475 million but I honestly believe we are still underperforming in that regard. Our third level institutions really need to look beyond the UK going beyond past 2020 when this programme expires and France is the obvious next step. The Irish College in Paris is there for a reason. It is a really obvious example.

I refer to the remarks of President Macron. I do not know if I should say this but I read the section in The Economist over and over. The intervention by President Macron, as a committed europhile, was really welcome. We saw a leader of a government in Europe speak about the European project, the European dream. For me it is very much an emotional thing as well as a fiscal and boring bureaucratic thing. To see someone speak for over an hour and a half was amazing. That was badly needed, it was really heartening and there was much to agree with in terms of the overall sentiment and the boost of enthusiasm. I cannot underline how timely that intervention was when we see the rise of petty nationalism in this country, be on the left or the right, in the ambassador's own country and across Europe. I mention the Austrian election results at the weekend. To see the electoral mandate given to the French President on a avidly pro-European platform is something that can only be of benefit to the Union as an entirety.

However, and there is always an however when it comes to these things, the vision of federalism portrayed by Emmanuel Macron, while worthy, is very much a French vision of federalism. Perhaps by its nature it is, therefore, more beneficial to some of the larger states. There are key areas of this federalist vision that I agree with. As I mentioned, education, linguistics and overseas development aid elements are areas where we need to see greater co-operation.

I was in Uganda a couple of weeks ago visiting Irish Aid projects. The list of EU member states donating to every project dwarfs anything else in the world. The retrograde decision by President Trump to cut US aid will only put the responsibility on the collective European Union projects, but also the projects of the individual countries. We need that overseas development aid for selfish and selfless reasons. The selfless reasons are pretty obvious; it is the right thing to do. The selfish reasons are that these will be our trading partners. This is how we stem the flow of refugee and excess migration by addressing the key economic and military issues, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

However, there are areas which I am going to flag before I hand over to a colleague. I refer to the idea of transnational MEPs. I understand it, appreciate it and I quite like it. I am a proud member of the European People's Party, and when I sat on the Committee of the Regions I did not necessarily sit on it first of all as a member of Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council. I sat as a member of the delegation of the European People's Party. It works to an extent. There is, however, this base level of nationalism that we cannot throw away from our inner being. If we look at the way President Jean-Claude Juncker was elected in the Spitzenkandidat method, it makes sense to those who have the list system in their elections. It went completely under the radar in Ireland. I remember Martin Schultz, the socialist candidate, came to Dublin and he might as well just have been a tourist from Germany. No one knew who he was and what he was doing. Try explain that process to countries like Ireland and Malta that have very different electoral systems and try throw transnational MEPs into it. Ultimately, when the people elect our MEPs from the island of Ireland they look at the person. We elect a lot more independents than any other member state because of our electoral system. People look at the party and where people are from. I remember a slogan used by one of my own party members demanding that Cork had an MEP. We are a long way from transnational MEPs if the good people of Cork think they merit an MEP over anyone else in the 27 member states.

The idea of bringing down the College of Commissioners from 28 to 15 has been tried before. We - I say "we" because I was part of the referendum campaign - lost a referendum campaign in this country and that, more or less, was the key issue. Can one imagine a College of Commissioners without a French or German Commissioner? It cannot happen. However, one can imagine one without an Irish Commissioner, a Luxembourger Commissioner or a Slovenian Commissioner who come from the smaller member states. Even though the portfolios are diluted, the College of Commissioners, like the Cabinet in this country, agrees and acts as one. They abandon their national identities when they become Commissioners and they take their brief, as has been seen with our current Commissioner, but the key thing is that they bring that individual choice. The opinion of an Austrian Commissioner is just as valid as the opinion of a Danish one and it bring a very different mindset. I know where that is coming from but it will not work.

I refer to the citizens' conventions. I worked on the citizens' dialogues during the EU Presidency we hosted in 2013. They were a good idea, and I said that when the Commission started this debate on the future of Europe, but ultimately Europe is brilliant at telling people how they can give out about Europe. Europe paid eurosceptics for 20 or 30 years in order to allow them destabilise the project in the European Parliament, be it the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group or the European Conservatives and Reformists group. One thing Europe is absolutely terrible at doing is selling itself. It is about getting signage on roads, plastering a massive European flag on it and saying something was funded by EU funds. One should not get into the specifics as to whether it was INTERREG funding, structural funds or Horizon 2020 research into biomass and pond life. One should just stick a flag on the signage, claim it and make sure people know that we have something to thank those bureaucrats, who come up with 75% of our indigenous legislation, for.

Senator Craughwell mentioned in our previous session that we have a great tendency as politicians just to blame Brussels for everything. Even today €475 million was announced in Horizon 2020 funding. One would swear that the Minister of State responsible had delivered it himself. There was no acknowledgement that this was a European project. That is far more important than discussing Europe and appealing to the intellectual abilities of a very small sector that will have the time, the ability and possibly the wherewithal to contribute to such conventions. Let us go on a European roadshow and let us get a few decent sales representatives out there. The diplomatic corps is brilliant but sometimes there can be too many draughtspeople and not enough sales people. That is something that Europe needs if it is to really engage people and remind people of my generation, who have no recollection of the Second World War, what it was like to travel pre-Schengen or use pesetas rather than euros in Spain. We must remind people and sell them on EU projects.

I have left the controversial issue on which we are going to disagree to the end. I refer to transnational taxation and say "No thanks". It is not in the interests of the smaller member states. I can see why the ambassador's country would want it, but that competitive edge would be removed from a small island in the Atlantic with 4.6 million people and with an economy that is still in the incubator after the worse economic crash since 1929. To say that a company can come to Europe but that it will pay the same corporate tax, whether in a country with a population and workforce the size of Germany or in Ireland, kneecaps the smaller member states. Although the focus is on Ireland, some of the Baltic states and eastern and central European states have adopted flat tax models and so on. It affects many more people. We have to repeat it time and again that the Franco-German obsession with Ireland's corporation tax is not helping the European project. If France wants Ireland not to follow its near neighbour and archaic ancestral tie out of the European Union, the last thing it should do is attack our corporate tax rate. It gives the eurosceptics an excuse they do not have, namely, to say that maybe Ireland would be better off outside of the European project.

Chairman, I have gone on way too long and I apologise.