Professor John O'Brennan:

Returning to the strategy for a moment, one important part of it sees the Government funding scholarships to the College of Europe in Bruges. The idea is that we would support sending a number of students every year. Bruges is routinely identified as the great finishing school for eurocrats. It rightly has a very high reputation but I make the point in my paper that we do not need to go to Bruges. We have fine offerings at masters level at Irish universities. I could not understand this part of the strategy. We have a very fine masters programme at University College Dublin, UCD. There is another in international relations in Europe at Dublin City University, DCU, and another at University College Cork, UCC. What we could do is provide scholarships that would allow some of our excellent graduates to take the MSc in European studies at UCD, because it is expensive. During the spring of their last year, undergraduates start coming to me to ask about options they might take. One of the things I do is routinely steer them towards the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden because all of these countries now have very good offerings at postgraduate level. They are all taught through English, and these jurisdictions are much cheaper than Ireland in terms of the fees that have to be paid. Here they average 15,000 per year and in recent years the cost of living has been a big issue as well.

It is also very good if they are internationalising their CV. However, there is not any reason we could not have some of our potential EU candidates take up a course at UCC or UCD. We have world-class people teaching in these institutions from all over the world, but the problem since the crisis in 2009 is that there have not been the supports there for postgraduate students to be able to take those kinds of options. We could revisit that and not just rely on the College of Europe producing an extra three or four people per year who might be successful in the competition.

One final point is about a more recent suggestion where the Government has floated the idea of an Irish only recruitment process. I gather that the Department of Foreign Affairs has been speaking with the Commission about this. However, it is interesting that Ireland is not an outlier. I thought until recently that we were one of the few member states struggling to get a sufficient number of candidates into the EU. That is not the case. We are about middle way in the rankings. Some of this is about the standard of living here and the options open to graduates. Brussels is also not as attractive as it used to be. In the 1970s, for example, Brussels was really attractive for talented graduates from Ireland because it was new, it was innovative and it was also tax free for many years. There were lots of perks. That is not the case any more. The Government is not alone in trying to persuade the Commission that an Irish only competition would be one way of getting more of our nationals into the institutions. Many other member states are doing this. I expect the Commission is probably going to change the way in which these competitions function in the future, precisely to address the kind of problem we have in Ireland.