Mr. Barry Andrews:

I will gallop through this, Chairman. On Deputy Calleary’s point, it feels a little bit bleak right now, but let us not forget that the effect of Brexit has been to deepen EU solidarity very profoundly and to deepen support for EU membership across the European member states. In last year’s European elections support for right-wing parties fell dramatically and the overall turnout increased for the first time in a very long time. The connection with the European citizens has to be made and the conference will do that. We will have to wait until after the pandemic, as I mentioned earlier.

On Deputy Ó Murchú’s question on scrutiny, other European affairs committees across the EU have much more involved scrutiny mechanisms. The Oireachtas does have an EU affairs directorate which distributes the files across the different committees, and this could be beefed up; there is no question or doubt about that. There is an early warning system where the Oireachtas can send a warning to the European Commission and look for an opinion from it. I do not believe that that has ever been used by the Oireachtas. Furthermore, there are other national parliaments that have a mandate capacity, that is, they can mandate their ministers to vote in a particular way in the EU Council. The Oireachtas does not have that facility. There are many things that can be done to strengthen that function.

On Senator Doherty’s point, we have to remember the difference between support for EU membership in Ireland and the support for EU integration. When people say that there is 90% support for the EU in Ireland we are thinking about support for membership and not necessarily for integration. We need to go into those figures in a little more detail.