I am not so naive as to imagine that the difficulty of involving the people of Europe was the fault of successive Governments to apply effective scrutiny to European affairs. The democratic deficit to which Senators Bradford and Ormonde referred is an issue throughout the Union and it is right that it is high on the agenda of the European Convention which is seeking to draw a road map for the future development of the European Union. Whereas others have failed to a greater or lesser extent, we in Ireland have failed abysmally. One only has to read the regular statistics from EUROSTAT to see the truth of this. For example, Ireland repeatedly scores highly in terms of approval of membership of the European Union. However, when it comes to knowledge of EU institutions and interest in the issues which concern them, our scores are consistently among the lowest. This bears out what I said about the 30 years of mismanaging the problem.