Dr. Catherine Day:

I will respond to a few different points. For as long as I have been involved with EU issues, there has been a quest by the institutions to convince the citizens of what a wonderful thing the EU is. There have always been different attempts to find a project that will unite people. However, the modern world is so complex now that there is not any single reason for such things.

The old post-war reasons of coming together so that never again would European countries go to war with each other does not catch the citizen imagination anymore. In the age of social media and immediate responses to everything, more than ever there is a need to find a way to have a quiet deliberative contact with citizens. That is why I think Ireland has something to offer in our experience of citizens' dialogue. My experience of looking at the previous ones and in the one that I am involved in now is that if one gives people objective information and time to think it through and discuss it, more often than not, they come to very sensible conclusions. We need to keep trying to have that.

Post-Brexit, for the small EU countries it is more important than ever that they find a way to explain the EU to their citizens. We are going to find that need here when the UK is no longer there. Returning to Ireland after so long in Brussels, I am really struck by how much Ireland is in an Anglosphere. We hardly ever discuss what happens on the Continent either in terms of politics, issues or even how they do things yet everyone is an expert on the United States, Australia or Canada. Why is that? It is because we are caught in an English-speaking environment. This could be a role for the national parliaments of the smaller countries. We will not be alone in this. We will all have to make a much bigger effort to understand the thinking, particularly in France and Germany, but also in looking for alliances with other countries. One must give to get. We might have to understand why the northern or eastern countries are so much more focused on issues that we do not think are important. During Brexit we saw a fantastic united effort by our politicians and our diplomats to fan out across Europe and to explain the Good Friday Agreement and Northern Ireland. In every foreign ministry in every other member state now there are people who really deeply understand it. Perhaps we cannot make that effort every time but we need to be building up a bedrock of understanding. The role of the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs, COSAC, and the national parliaments will be as much about that as it will be about looking at the legislation, particularly since many EU policies are fairly mature now and there will be much less legislation in future. What must come in its place is much more discussion about how we tackle different issues together. Small countries do not have the expertise or the resources of the bigger countries but they often find more pragmatic ways of advancing policy objectives than the bigger countries. A whole new world is opening up there and we will all miss the expertise of the UK. Somehow we have to find a way to replace it.

My point on the Anglosphere also relates to Deputy Calleary's question of why there are so few younger Irish people joining the institutions. One thing is that we were all infected a little by the British media and by rubbishing Brussels as very bureaucratic and not a cool, exciting place to be. My experience is that is very far from the truth. It is a fascinating career for anyone. The second problem is that we are very poor at languages and one must have a second language to get a permanent position in any of the other institutions. We simply have not worked on that. Even when people put down Irish as a second language, they regularly fail the test because their Irish is not good enough to qualify as a second language. We need to talk up the importance of careers in the European institutions but we also need to make sure that people understand that there is a language requirement and perhaps facilitate intensive language courses for people who are candidates for competitions. One needs to build up an intake at the bottom in order that 20 years later those people come through to the senior levels. There are also other ways, such as national civil servants spending a few years in the different institutions. We need to deploy all these things because it will be much harder and much more important in future in the wake of the British departure that we have people who understand the Irish situation, not in any sense taking national instructions, but the reason the institutions are keen on a broad degree of representativity is because one cannot make good laws and policies if one does not understand the national circumstances of each member state.

Those two points are very important.

It is important to try to get people to focus on how the wider EU works. We all inevitably tend to look at it from our own position. For example, when something bad happens in the world, very often people ask why did the EU not do something. We need to have that debate with people and we need to discuss whether we would be willing to give up the principle of unanimity in foreign policy. If we wait for the last member state to agree on a statement or an action, the EU will never be quick to respond. We have to take it from the example of what is it that is holding the EU back rather than immediately ask what most people will find an extremely tedious question about whether they are willing to give up unanimity in foreign policy issues. The lesson that I am learning from the citizens' dialogue is that we have to be willing to explain in ordinary language and ordinary terms, give people time to think about these issues, and then ask them to come to a conclusion.

I will make one further comment on Deputy Calleary's question, and that is about the digital exclusion. We were quite slow to move the Citizens' Assembly on gender equality online because we were worried about many things, including that. When we surveyed the members, however, we found that very few of them were not willing to go online. People were very familiar with Zoom, for example, using it for family quizzes, family get-togethers and all the rest of it. We offered training to those who were not sure that they could manage. The reliability of broadband is still an issue, but again most people have managed to overcome that in our experience. For what it is worth, I do not think the issue of digital exclusion should necessarily be a hamper to having the citizens' dialogue online.