Professor John O'Brennan:

I thank the committee for the invitation to address the committee. It is a very good time to be having this conversation as we approach the 50^thanniversary of Irish accession to the European Union. We should acknowledge that we have had some extraordinary people represent us in the EU at both the political and administrative levels. The hard work put in by Irish officials away from the limelight across EU spaces over these decades has contributed much to helping Ireland punch above its weight at EU level. We are all more than aware of the issue regarding numbers. Ireland faces a collapse in the number of our nationals working in the EU institutions, almost unprecedented in scale over the 50 years of our membership. I suggest we have a short-term to medium-term challenge in how we turn that recruitment problem around. It is also connected crucially to the broader issue of how we communicate the idea of Europe, both within our society and in particular within secondary schools and the third level system. There is much that could be done in these spaces to help achieve the narrow aim of better levels of recruitment and the broader one about communicating the idea of Europe.

We are facing a cliff edge, with more than a third of Irish officials expected to retire by 2025, while we have simply failed to keep up with a level of recruitment of younger Irish people over the past decade. Since 2015, only 22 Irish nationals have passed the EU’s Concoursexamination. That is far below the 69 officials who are expected to retire formally before 2025. There is a big imbalance there and it is a looming problem.While the reasons for this are not straightforward, everybody accepts that it is a problem for Ireland in how we conduct business in Brussels and defend our interests in different EU spaces.

The Government has been conscious of this for some time. Last year a new strategy called A Career for EU was produced, which was very welcome. It had many positive elements within it including the prospective expansion of the existing third level-focused EU jobs campaign and the intention to also roll that out into secondary schools, which could be very important. Other elements are the inclusion of Northern Ireland academic institutions as key partners here and a new EU stream to be introduced into the Civil Service. All of these things are potentially very useful. However, there are also concerns about the strategies' effectiveness.

In the 1970s the University of Limerick was a pioneer in offering European studies. Over a long period we managed to expand the number of courses on offer that touched on Europe in different respects be it in economics, law, political science, sociology or other disciplines. There is a growing crisis in European studies, in particular. We now have only two remaining courses in European studies in Ireland. One of them is at Trinity College and the other is at the University of Limerick. While in some ways there has been success in mainstreaming Europe into different programmes I regret the absence from university curricula of dedicated European studies programmes, especially those that had a language component. Whatever we are going to do into the future I would hope that the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science is included as a key partner in developing strategies to address the recruitment issue.

Up to now, the Government’s approach to recruitment has been limited to an annual road show where the Minister of State with responsibility for European affairs toured the universities every spring and talked to graduates about the potential for pursuing a career at EU level. There was very little beyond that. Although the A Career for EU strategy will help to improve things, there is a lot more we could do. A problem with the strategy is that it envisages going through the careers' offices in universities rather than through academics like myself who are actually working at the coal face of Europe. We think it would be much better if the strategy, as it pertains to the universities and third level institutions, went through the academics who, in one way or another, are doing Europe as part of their day jobs. We are the people who are in touch with civil servants, diplomats and with others who have the potential to make a difference. I do not think there is any lack of willingness among academics to help. Early on, we should be helping to identify really talented undergraduates who look like they have the potential for, and the interest in, European affairs. The simple fact is they now have lots of options open to them in their careers and one of the reasons we are struggling to identify people who might end up in European institutions is that we are not offering the early mentoring they need. If they had this mentoring it might mean that they would really take Europe seriously.