Martin Mansergh (Tipperary South, Fianna Fail)

If political leaders in this House will not uphold the democratic institutions of the State, it is hard to know who will.

While any political abuses must certainly be reformed and necessary reductions made in our political and administrative overheads and the cost of our democracy, it is high time we stood up to the denigration of this Parliament coming from certain areas of the media. A perfect example of cheap, ill-informed journalism is to be found in yesterday's Evening Herald, which talks about Senators thinking it was a good idea to swan off this week to Swansea for a meeting of the British Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body. Attendance at that body is an important and integral parliamentary duty for its members. I was proud to be a member for six years as a Senator and Deputy. That body has contributed to the great improvement in British-Irish understanding which has been one of the building blocks of peace on this island and between these islands. There is only one respect, perhaps, in which the body is or was the occasion of what might be politely called a works outing, and that was the number of journalists, past and present, who used to attend, well in excess of any subsequent visible output covering the proceedings.

One of the principal causes of the loss of the first Lisbon referendum was that despite the valiant work of the Forum on Europe and bodies such as the Irish Council of the European Movement, the public felt they did not understand the treaty or where the EU is going. While politicians must communicate, the media need to enable them to do so by showing the same interest in policy debates as in politics. While there are many excellent and profound commentators, columnists and interviewers in all branches of the media, there is also plenty of room for improving the overall quality of content and the level of discourse.

In agreement with Deputy Bernard Durkan, I hope it is not mere pious aspiration, now the referendum has been passed, that inside and outside the Oireachtas we will show an interest in trying to live up to the higher European commitment resulting from ratification. There is one dimension of the European project that would help bind it more closely to its citizens. Whatever may sometimes be maintained on a strict construction of the European treaties, Europe was always a political as well as an economic project, and it brought to an end centuries of destructive wars. The missing element is the cultural one which, under the principle of subsidiarity, belongs to member states. That should be supplemented more at EU level. None of us would have any real difficulty in accepting the notion of a European culture and civilisation or its more active propagation.

This year is the bicentenary of the birth of Mendelssohn and the death of Haydn, as well as the 250th anniversary of the death of Handel, not to mention the birth of the Guinness brewery in Dublin.

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