Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Dr. Day to the meeting. I have no doubt that the role she continues to play will bear good fruit in the future as it has in the past. I happened to be at a meeting in Bucharest for the past two days at which the same subject matter was up for debate. I have been attending meetings for a long time in Europe. I have been doing it for almost 40 years, when I think of it. The same questions come around again and again with regard to bringing Europe closer to the people. The phrase is wrong. It should be the other way round, along the lines that Senator Richmond has been speaking about. The people and we, as representatives of the people, need to familiarise ourselves more with what affects our colleagues in other countries throughout Europe. Unfortunately, what Britain did was that it stood aloof from Europe. In the days of Henry Plumb, for example, it was different but since then the critique has gone on without cessation and there has been constant criticism. Constant dripping wears a stone, and it did. Let us not forget that Nigel Farage and such people were elected for this purpose and became the lightning rod for debate in the area, to the extent they dominated the debate whenever it took place, which was regularly.

We had presentations of this nature at the meeting on the future of Europe I attended in recent days with extremes of right and left. I was reminded of a similar meeting I attended in Berlin a few years ago when the order paper asked "Where is social Europe?". This was at the very beginning of the economic crash. Nobody seemed to understand that when times got really bad other distractions arose and leaders throughout Europe had to attend to the issues that were of the most serious domestic importance and they did so, largely with beneficial effect. Again, sadly, Britain took the opportunity to criticise at that particular time and much of the media in the UK was dedicated to a constant critique of where Europe was and how it was going to fail. We seem to have forgotten in recent years that the prediction was the euro was about to fail and disintegrate and the reasons for it came largely from the media in the UK and they were not all tabloid.

I am sure that at various meetings we have all had to listen to a tirade of how poor we were and how much poorer we were going to get as a result of being members of the European Union. We need to take ownership. We have done this better than most other countries but every member of the European Union needs to take ownership of the Union. If they do not do so they will move apart and populism will win out. It is hugely important the elected public representatives throughout Europe, in domestic politics and in the European Parliament, take on the critics and those offering the easy options. Let us not forget this is not the first time populism invaded Europe. This is not the first time by a long shot. Those who say it can never happen again are wrong. These things have happened again. Man's inhumanity to man knows no bounds when it comes to repetition.

We need to be conscious of that and of the fact that we can do something about it. My feeling, based on the discussions over the past couple of days, is that we need to be alert. We need to speak. Without doing it aggressively, we need to dissect the arguments put forward by people pursuing a populist stance and prove to them by reason that they are wrong, and the extremes on both sides are wrong.

The alliances are most important. That is the way to do it. It is part of the natural progression of getting to know the other people better. I entirely agree with Senator Richmond that the national politicians need to get to know each other. How else do all of us here understand the issues that affect other people? There are deep worrying issues affecting every country in the European Union, as they do in every country all over the world. It is up to ourselves to be familiar with and sympathetic towards them, and if we do not find ourselves in agreement with them that at least we understand them and can do something about it in that way.

I hope that we do not disintegrate towards a world trade war. There were a few hints at it in the past few days. There is a danger that we could descend into a tit-for-tat situation. We had to explain yesterday to some people that trade agreements are not the gift of one group, one country or one philosophy. They are reached by agreement. The late Peter Sutherland spent considerable time negotiating the GATT many years ago. A feeling seems to be developing that the most powerful should dictate the pace and that, by so doing, they will achieve a situation that they could not achieve by agreement through natural discussion and dialogue. That is a worrying factor, and it is particularly worrying for smaller countries. In the aggression that takes place in trade wars, the smaller countries get damaged first and hit hardest, and the protagonists unfortunately damage each other to the extent that the fallout is the same again in so far as the smaller countries are concerned.

I am a little concerned about the drop-off in the Civil Service involvement in Brussels. That is something we should directly address. That should be addressed in the educational system and through the diplomatic services here. It should be done as a matter of urgency. We need to educate people for those positions in Brussels in all organisations that we Europeans converge on for whatever reason.

Europe is going through a hiatus at present. Questions are being raised in a number of member states, which we would regard unreasonable because all the alternatives put forward have been tried previously and failed. What is it with people sometimes that we must go back and have the same debate, often in trying circumstances, despite the fact that there is strong evidence to show that they failed previously? We can go back centuries and find the same thing. Europe has its own heritage in that area. We need not go back beyond the 20th century to find out all that we could do wrong and the depths to which we could go to inflict the maximum punishment on each other with death and destruction in all directions. For any generation, and particularly the present generation, of politicians from whichever side to forget that is a sad reflection on society.

I thank Dr. Day for the work that she continues to do in that area, and particularly for flagging for us what was happening before it happened. I believe greatly in the maxim that to be able to avert a crisis before it becomes recognised as a crisis is a greater art than trying to deal with it when the place is in flames.