Ms Jill Donoghue:

Thank you, Chairman, and I thank the committee members for their responses. It is becoming a lively and interesting discussion.

Reference was made to our partnerships with other think tanks. This is something close to my heart. I am now 20 years at the institute and I have been trying to develop links over the years. We have three groups of partnerships. We are members of an organisation called Trans European Policy Studies Association, TEPSA, which organises meetings twice per year before the assumption of the EU Council Presidency between sister institutes of international and European affairs throughout the EU. We are also involved with foundations as such as the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the respective conservative and social democrat foundations, as well as the Green Party's Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung in Germany. These relationships go back over many years. We have hosted joint conferences with these foundations and sometimes with their support.

Many of my researchers write for some of the think tanks in the context of TEPSA. We have written a joint book with the institute in Croatia. We have a former director of the Institut français des relations internationales, IFRI, the French think tank, who has been writing blogs and a long analytical paper for us on populism. The final group is made up of think tanks outside of the TEPSA network such as Chatham House, the Centre for European Reform and the Federal Trust in London, as well as many others that are specific to particular areas. These may include think tanks that focus on economic areas, like Bruegel. We have regular contact with such bodies. Our economist group invites members of these think tanks to discuss economic issues. We have active interaction with all of these think tanks. We each read the work all these organisations produce and that helps us to see where others countries are coming from. It is an important element in the work we are doing on the future of Europe.

Some of the themes raised in the questions are of interest. We were asked who our contacts are and who we have relations with on particular themes, such as migration, the budget and climate change. The relations are differentiated. We have done considerable work with Malta and countries on the front line in the southern region that have had the experience of migration in a manner that is far more direct than we have experienced in Ireland. Solidarity and responsibility are the two concepts most associated with what an Irish response could and should be. We have also looked closely at the budget. The negotiations on the multi-annual financial framework are interesting and committee members will see as much if they go online to our EU Explorer tool. One option available to us involves maintaining the same amount of money and the same priorities that we have had. The second scenario involves increasing the amount of money that we have and keeping the same priorities. The third scenario involves increasing the amount of money that we spend and increasing or perhaps changing the priorities from the traditional priorities to accommodate issues such as counter-terrorism and the challenges of migration and climate change. It is envisaged that these discussions will come to a close under the Finnish EU Council Presidency and, if not, in the following Croatian Presidency but well before the German Presidency.

We were asked about parliamentary relations. I know from talking over the years to Deputy Durkan in this context that this committee has been active in developing relations with parliamentary friendship associations in other countries. Perhaps there might not be a grand committee for home affairs in the Parliament at which everyone will get the opportunity to engage. The key is perhaps to break down the issues in justice and home affairs into smaller bite-sized pieces to cover cybersecurity; counter-terrorism; fake news; digital issues associated with privacy; fraud; human trafficking and how blockchain and artificial intelligence affect all areas, including justice and home affairs. Those of us at the institute have found that by engaging with rapporteurs from committees, who have written expert reports, we get a good insight not only into the combined consensus reached in a committee but a more differentiated view of where individual member states are coming from as well.

I will leave the question on personal relationships to Ms Cross, who has experience at first hand of dealing in a diplomatic context with the European Council. In general, the view in the institute has always been that the more engagement we can have, the better, not only at the highest levels but all the way through the different levels in the EU institutions, whether the European Commission, the European Parliament or the European Court of Justice. Going to committees, making friendships and having a direct relationship with people definitely yield a bonus.

I was asked whether Ireland is the bold child of the EU. I think we are now what the Germans would call the Musterknabe. We are in fact the model child again in the EU. We had our problems with the banking crisis but I have come back from various visits in Berlin during the months since January and I have been delighted to see how Germany respects the Irish people for the way they dealt with the crisis and how in many ways, the crisis led to a development of entrepreneurship. Where people lost their jobs they suddenly tried to create new jobs. Perhaps the digital area was one of the areas in which this was a possibility. There is a strong sense of cohesion and solidarity in Germany in particular, as well as in other states, for the position of Ireland regarding the backstop and that is certainly music to our ears.

We are working with various countries on climate change. I mentioned earlier that we hosted a major conference last year at which some 500 people attended to discuss solutions to climate change. When I met the French ambassador, H.E. Stéphane Crouzat, we talked about what approach we would take.

There is much talk about the threat posed by climate change, the planet burning and the negative issues associated with it. It might be interesting to adopt a more solutions-oriented approach. Accordingly, we came up with the proposal of a marché des idées, a market of ideas. It was a conference to produce many ideas and solutions. We then invited young and older people across the country to enter a competition to come up with ideas to provide solutions to the problem of climate change. We had everything from musicians playing the sounds of a melting iceberg – perhaps not the most practical – and apps developed by younger people to the young lady in Dún Laoghaire who had started work on her machine to draw plastic from Dún Laoghaire Harbour. That is a concrete example. Likewise, in the autumn, with the ESB, we will host a climate change event to look at designing a low-carbon future. We will be looking at energy use in cities. We seem to be drifting towards an urban future where climate change will play an important role. We will be looking at the design of traffic systems and houses, as well as how to make buildings smarter and help people who are willing to invest personally in climate change measures to achieve this.

On the digital side, we have been working in our digital and justice groups on issues associated with cyber security. I will leave the defence issue to Ms Cross who is an expert in the area. We have been looking at issues such as cyber security, critical infrastructure protection and disinformation, with many other areas such as ethics and the governance of artificial intelligence and block chain technology. Again, these are opportunities but also hidden threats, unless frameworks are put in place in advance to enable Ireland to adopt an appropriate position.