Professor John O'Brennan:

As to what students are doing that they may not have been doing previously, there are two aspects. One is about internationalism generally. They are not just going to Brussels; it is very far from being the only game in town. If someone wants to pursue a career in an international organisation, it is not just the United Nations and places like Geneva. Even in Brussels, as Deputy Harkin said, there is a layer of campaigning organisations of different kinds and regional representations of different groups and, therefore, it is easy to slot into one of those spaces where previously people's options might have been more limited. There is an argument that there are now more lobbyists in Brussels than in Washington DC, which seems extraordinary, but that certainly fits with my experience. There are a lot of those kind of options in international organisations and entities of different kinds that were maybe not there previously. It is also true that the terms and conditions of those working within the institutions are just not as attractive as they used to be. What our graduates are doing is they are lawyers, going into finance and human resources, working for multinational corporations of every kind in addition to civil society groups and the kind of international groups that I have talked about. There is vastly more opportunity in Brussels and beyond the EU.

The Commission is genuinely concerned. I have been reading a number of documents that I would be happy to pass on to the Deputy where they are beginning to address the nature of the problem by looking at data, for example, the data I mentioned about where Ireland sits in respect of the number of nationals that are being successful. The European Parliament is also concerned about this and looking at the problem. I am sure there is a lot of representation going on between individual member states to the Commission so I expect we will see some movement on this next year for sure.

On the question of languages, it has not changed in respect of the EU in that someone needs at least two languages in order to get into the institutions and progress. However in respect of Brussels itself, there was an enormous change in the early 2000s especially after the accession of central and eastern European states after 2004. Prior to that if I was advising students, I would always say they needed at least French along with English to survive in Brussels but that has not been the case for a long time. I have noticed, because I have spent a lot of time in central and eastern Europe, that more universities there are offering courses in English to make themselves attractive to international students. Putting the different pieces of this together language is just not as important as it used to be but when it comes to progressing through the European institutions, it is still a requirement. We have a significant problem in Ireland. Language learning is part of the explanation for some of relative drop in applications. There is evidence that for even the people who are coming out of university with French and German as part of their degrees, the standard they have is inadequate relative to the minimum threshold the Commission and other organisations look for. The Department of Foreign Affairs has been helping in part to get the candidates to the level they need to be at for some years now but this has to be rooted at primary level so that we devote significantly more resources to language learning and that is carried through the secondary system and into the third level system.

Another thing I think the A Career for EU strategy is banking on is that many more kids will come through the system from Irish-Polish and Irish-Slovak households and that will solve the problem for us because they tend to have better language capacity, depending on when they arrived in Ireland and what the languages spoken in the households may be. That may well help in addition but we should do much more foundationally to put better language training in place from the earliest possible point and take it right through to third level.