Professor John O'Brennan:

Those are good questions. There is definitely a role for secondment. Regarding Department of Foreign Affairs, DFA, officials, in recent weeks I have done a series of talks on Ireland and Europe as we come up to the 50th anniversary of accession. I have spoken in the US, Germany, Bulgaria and Romania. I have been hugely impressed by all of the young DFA officials whom I have met. They are doing extraordinary work. Some of them may well end up seconded to Brussels for different periods.

In some ways, the importance of having people in the EU is intangible because the Deputy is correct people who work for the Commission are enjoined to work on behalf of the European interest and not on behalf of their national interest. However, we all know that from the very beginning there has been a fungibility about this. For me, as I travel around regularly, the one thing that becomes apparent is that in the 1970s, our officials learned how to play the European game effectively. That was an advantage to Ireland in the subsequent years. It is also about the projection of soft power. People like us and trust us. When they encounter us in the different spaces in the EU, they are almost predisposed to help us because they perceive Ireland as a trusted mediator. That is a very different from being the national of a large member state that may have different kinds of baggage. I cannot prove this but I know that in some competitions for funding that I have been in at European Union level, the fact that I was Irish was probably an advantage to me. In some cases, it is because those officials at very senior level have had such positive engagements with Ireland. They may have come here on the Erasmus+ programme over the past 30 something years and enjoyed it or it is because their encounters with Irish people have been largely positive. It is intangible but that does not mean that it is not substantive and does not deliver important things for the country in the longer term.