Professor Federico Fabbrini:

To answer Deputy Ó Murchú's question, it is a book on the withdrawal agreement with a preface by Mr. Michel Barnier. It was published last week and may perhaps be of interest to the committee as it is the first and most comprehensive book looking at the Brexit deal.

Joking aside, I am very happy to address the other points that were raised. I will start with Deputy Haughey's question. He hit on one of the big difficulties of the conference which has to simultaneously be a bottom-up process involving citizens but also, necessarily, a top-down exercise where the elite - whatever that means - must identify some for priority issues for change. Whenever one talks about institutional questions, it is, as has been pointed out many times, really hard to involve the citizens and yet good institutions are crucial for good democracies. This is why it is inevitable that these questions need to be tackled. The organisation of the conference will have to find a way to reflect that. The model of the Convention on the Future of Europe in the early 2000s is potentially the solution to follow. In that case there would be a relatively small group of people gathering and deliberating but with channels of dissemination at the national level, particularly through the involvement of national parliaments which allow for the involvement of citizens on the ground to discuss those issues.

There was a question on governance. It is crucial that the governance system of the European Union be addressed. We currently have an architecture for decision-making in Europe which is, to a large extent, the result of incremental developments without much grand design behind it, and we see the limits of that.

We have seen it throughout all the crises we have faced. We are now stuck in a situation where it is very hard for us, as a Union, to move forward on issues like the environment because states can wield a veto on issues like fiscal capacity and the development of a large recovery plan because states have a veto on own resources in the new multi-annual financial framework, MFF. Of course, the same applies to foreign policy where Europe remains a dwarf. It has no capacity to cobble together a single position on conflicts at its back door like the one in Nagorno-Kabarakh.

Addressing those governance weaknesses is, therefore, crucial. It has been emphasised rightly that this will not be easy and might even lead towards a multi-speed European Union. We already know that multi-speed is a component of the process. There is the eurozone, among others, of which Ireland is a key part, not least because the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, is now the president of the Eurogroup, has a very clear and strong leading role on the Economic and Monetary Union, EMU, and eurozone governance. The eurozone is a sub-club within the whole EU-27 and as we move forward, it might become even more separate and even more integrated. I mentioned earlier a number of different treaties adopted in the past decade to deepen further the governance of the Economic and Monetary Union, the European Fiscal Compact, the European Stability Mechanism, ESM, the Single Resolution Fund. That all points towards almost a decoupling of the eurozone and the EU-27. We are not yet at that point and we could have a long discussion on whether it is positive or not but it is a trend, a trend of decoupling and it is something the Conference on the Future of Europe will also have to consider in its work. That is why, in my report for the Parliament, I suggested a political compact as an add-on to the fiscal compact to make the EU and specifically the EMU more democratic and effective.

Clearly there are multiple challenges ahead but I would also like to really praise the work of the Oireachtas joint committee on this. To my knowledge, not many national parliaments have actually started a conversation on those topics, so that puts Ireland in a very good position to influence this. If one considers also the very positive experience of the citizens' assembly tradition in this country, including the latest exercise led by Dr. Day, this could be an area where the country punches above its weight. Even if Ireland is a relatively small state among the 27, it actually has many resources.

I mentioned earlier that the overall positive attitude of the population towards the EU following Brexit is an asset. I encourage the committee to continue its work on this. I remain very optimistic that Ireland could play a very influential role in those discussions, including building bridges across member states on some controversial issues that will inevitably come up in the discussion about the conference. I, of course, remain available to assist as we move ahead.