Ms Noelle O'Connell:

Go raibh maith agaibh as an gcuireadh bheith libh inniú. It is a privilege for European Movement Ireland to be here to discuss the findings of our most recent 2024 EU opinion poll, which is the only dedicated poll conducted throughout the island of Ireland on EU issues and is something that European Movement Ireland has been doing since 2013.

This year, our opinion poll results are particularly pertinent, given that the 2024 European Parliament elections will be in a few weeks time. We are all aware that these elections are taking place in challenging times, which is in marked contrast to previous elections over the past nine parliamentary terms. Arguably, the 2024 elections are being conducted against a backdrop of an emboldened far right in a range of countries, including the Netherlands, Austria, France, Poland, Hungary and Italy. This shifting political reality in Europe poses unique threats to the stability and effectiveness of the next Parliament. A stronger representation of the far right in the European Parliament, in addition to a growing rise in populism, will likely lead to greater fragmentation and uncertainty and will undoubtedly make policymaking that is consistent with EU values more challenging.

In these uncertain times, our most recent EU opinion poll provides some important insights into public sentiment in Ireland on the EU and underlines how important it is for our national legislators, MEPs and the EU institutions more generally to not only listen to voters' concerns, but also to work to engage and resolve them.

Since 2013, European Movement Ireland has carried out annual independent polling on Ireland’s relationship with the EU across a number of different metrics. Our efforts to track and analyse Irish sentiment towards the EU is unique and the poll is a valuable tool for measuring public opinion as regards Ireland's membership of the EU. The regularity with which we carry out this exercise allows us to not only capture sentiment as a snapshot in time, but also to track changes and to present trends on Irish EU sentiment that have occurred over the years. Bearing the usual caveats and health warnings around opinion polls in mind, we will endeavour to highlight a few points from our results this year that members may find interesting.

Despite a decline of 4% on last year’s poll, the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland, at 84%, and Northern Ireland, at 76%, believe that Ireland should remain a member of the EU. This represents a drop from 88% last year. While consistently high support for Ireland remaining in the EU is welcome, the poll findings indicate that this positive sentiment masks a growing dissatisfaction with the EU’s performance on certain issues. When we asked whether people felt that the EU was moving in the right direction, there was a significant decline in both jurisdictions in respondents who agreed with this statement. A drop from 58% last year to 49% this year perhaps indicates a degree of hesitancy and increased concern as regards the EU’s performance. Sadly, the metrics do not enable us to make assumptions regarding the individual reasons behind this decline, but some of the follow-up survey questions, which we will go into in greater detail in a moment, point to a number of areas of EU action where there is evident dissatisfaction among the Irish public.

For the second year in a row, we asked respondents whether they believed there would be a united Ireland in the EU in the next ten years. The results were almost on a par with last year's findings, with 47% agreeing in Northern Ireland and 25% in Ireland.

This year for the first time, we asked respondents to rate the EU’s performance across a range of policy areas on where people saw it performing strongest and weakest. Policy areas that we asked about included defence, security, the environment, migration, tax, agriculture, trade and digital regulation. Close to half of respondents in Ireland, at 46%, and 55% in Northern Ireland believed that the EU’s performance was strongest in the area of trade. Close to one in two of respondents in Ireland believed that the EU was weakest in the area of migration, at 46%. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that migration has been a major policy challenge for the EU and has dominated public agendas both here in Ireland and across Europe in recent months.

I will invite my colleague, Ms Hayes, to go through some of the other findings.