Dr. Catherine Day:

I will try to be quick. I am not a bit afraid of what Senator McDowell has said. In fact, I welcome the way he crystallises this issue and whether the debate is about an appetite for integration or effectiveness. I, of course, hope that it can be about effectiveness. For example, for a country like France, whose main concern is the place of Europe in the world, the question is how Europe influences the rest of the world. How do we then influence our own destiny by organising ourselves differently? If we could have a focus on effectiveness, even if people articulate it very differently, that would be great. The risk is when one asks 27 members states what to talk about, in order to get agreement one puts everything on the shopping list. That risk has to be overcome to get some kind of focus in the debate.

Many of our citizens are very far away from Europe and we cannot take for granted that they understand how the EU works. At the Citizens' Assembly on gender equality we were asked to give an explanation about the role of the Constitution and how it links into legislation because many of our own citizens do not really understand that. How would they then understand the relationship between the Treaty of Lisbon or even what we have been discussing this morning, which is the role of national parliaments in the wider EU? There needs to be a strong factual information flow to support the conference, however it gets going. We need to connect citizens so they can talk to one another. My experience has been that when one gets people to calmly discuss something on an informed basis and to take the time to do it, it is much easier for them to understand one another's points of view. Sometimes they agree and sometimes they respect the differences. We need to find ways, maybe different ones, to connect ourselves with other European citizens.