Maurice Hayes (Independent)

Cuirim fáilte roimh bhaill Pharlaimint na hEorpa. Senator Ormonde was kind enough to refer to my chairmanship of the National Forum on Europe. That imposes its own obligation on me to protect the integrity and independence of the forum. I will, therefore, deal with structural matters. This is an extremely important occasion. It is an important development in the linkage between the European Parliament and the Oireachtas. I hope it could be important for the MEPs in providing them with a locus in which they could report on developments in Europe. It is extremely valuable and enriching for this House to get a feeling for what is happening in Europe. I hope we will have some feedback after today's session so we can develop a method whereby we do not simply talk at each other, but have a real interchange. Unlike Senator Ross, I do not see the necessity for a Minister to be present, as it changes the dynamic. Exchanges take place across the Chamber and while a Minister can often have an input or give his or her information on policy, the real exchange should be between the two groups of parliamentarians.

I like to think that the forum provided a similar service to Proinsias De Rossa, MEP, and his colleagues when they were participating in the Convention. It gave them a place in Ireland to which they could return to tell the people of developments and receive reactions to what was being proposed or not proposed from a fairly representative group of people including all the parties as well as civil society.

I am glad the Minister stated that the Referendum Commission was to be established fairly quickly and undertook to ensure that it was properly funded to carry out its necessary task. The commission and anyone who examined its work agrees that the more time it gets to do its task before a referendum, the better.

I was prepared to offer the Minister a prize for the understatement of the year when he noted that the European draft constitution would not win any prizes for prose style. It certainly would not and its authors took, I believe, some 480 pages, to do what Jefferson achieved in a very small number of sentences. This is one of the problems people have when projecting a vision of Europe. It is happening currently in France. It is so diffuse that people cannot get a grip on it. It is necessary for all the parliamentarians here to help convey to people the message that they have a stake in Europe and should be interested in how it is governed and run.

In this sense, whether it is governed by this constitution or some variant is immaterial. There is a real difficulty in making that connection and my concern in a referendum is not whether people voted "Yes" or "No" to the proposition put before them but whether they vote at all. A general turning away from politics as such has occurred, particularly among young people. The challenge is to encourage people to turn out in a referendum. Another challenge is to always ensure they are reasonably informed before they do so. They should be helped with information to make up their own minds on the issue.

People are interested. For example, we had two meetings of the forum last week. One was in Roscommon, which Proinsias De Rossa, MEP, the Minister and Deputy Gormley attended. Another took place two weeks earlier in Gweedore, in which Séan Ó Neachtain, MEP, Deputy Ó Snodaigh and Alan Dukes were engaged. People were willing to be engaged and there was a thirst for information. This is the challenge for us all. Today however, laying the foundation for what I hope will be a long-term relationship between the Members of the European Parliament from Ireland and this House is more important than the actual debate on the constitution.