Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Like many of my books. Some of this has already been dealt with. There is significant disengagement from politics. People have spoken about the US and what happened in Great Britain with Brexit. Politics on both a domestic and Europe-wide basis has not delivered for certain people and sometimes they will go in directions we do not necessarily want them to go. We talk about how popular the European project is in this State and across the island but if one went back ten years and more regarding the European methodology for dealing with the banking crisis, one would get a different result on the street in Ireland.

Professor Fabrini talked about weaknesses. How does he see some of these being rectified? I know we talk about pandemic recovery. We now have conversations about the rule of law and health competencies.

People see there are problems with Europe. The European Union and we ourselves have had to contravene certain rules to allow for major state intervention to get us through this. There is a fear of further integration, of the possibility that it is a further drive towards privatisation and against the possibility of state intervention. There is that wider fear of a European army.

Professor Fabbrini spoke about the intergovernmental pathway. Perhaps I have taken this the wrong way but there is a possibility with all of that that we could end up with a number of tiers of European interaction and relationships. We might end up not with a two-tier Europe but one with three or four tiers and I am unsure how exactly that would work.

I really like the idea of engaging with people and asking them what they want while at the same time having very specific conversations. Anybody who has ever had a public meeting that directly related to people's lives knows it can be very difficult to get people interested in stuff that directly relates to them. The question for us, and this has probably come up over the last while at state parliaments in general, is that there is a notion that this State has relied on Britain to do much of the due diligence. There is consequently a need for us to build up capacity to ensure we are on top of what is happening with legislation but also with what the moves are within Europe. If the witnesses can answer those questions in the next 20 minutes, I will be delighted.