Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy McEntee, to the House and I welcome the opportunity for these statements since we celebrated Europe Day yesterday. I thank the Minister of State for her speech. It provides us for a good opportunity to reflect on the future of Europe and the context for the many challenges posed by the Brexit vote. Clearly there are massive challenges posed by Brexit. There are practical challenges and conceptual or ideological challenges about how we react to or address the real concerns citizens have about the project of the European Union. Those concerns were manifested in the vote on Brexit and the disconnection the Minister of State spoke about which citizens feel with the institutions. It was reflected in the report of the European Committee of the Regions, which was recently published.

There are less serious challenges too. I have just come back from a Burren Law School session in Ballyvaughan at the weekend where we had a discussion about Brexit. The journalist, Alison O'Connor, spoke about the challenge for those in the media seeking to write about Brexit of making it of interest to people. She spoke very eloquently about the difficulty of making Brexit interesting and enabling people to engage with it as a topic. She said it is just too big and abstract and it is hard to make it tangible and humorous and to make connections when writing about it. She has done a great deal to make the language of it more accessible. We need more of that.

I commend the Minister of State on the national citizens' dialogues. It is part of a process of trying to ensure greater engagement with citizens and to ensure people feel more connected with the European project. Part of the difficulty, from speaking with those engaged in the negotiations on Brexit, is the practical challenges of trying to find out exactly what the British side is seeking in the negotiations or if there is a unified British side we can speak of, given that several members of the Cabinet seem to be actively undermining their own Prime Minister at every step of the negotiations. That is a practical challenge we face in Ireland.

I will refer to the broader conceptual challenges of Brexit and the issues the Brexit vote brought to the fore. All of us here felt a profound bleakness at the result when it was announced in June 2016 because it was such an inward looking vote and was strongly influenced by a xenophobic nationalism and by Britain turning its back on Europe. It was also a demographic issue of the old turning their backs on the young. We all saw the breakdown of voters. It was also particularly distressing because it marked a victory for anti-intellectualism and anti-rational thinking. It was a victory for hate over hope. We saw at the time a rise in hate crimes, the incidence of racist graffiti and of people who were not of British origin feeling more uncomfortable in Britain. There remains very real uncertainty over the status of thousands of EU citizens, including Irish citizens, resident in the UK and of the thousands of British people resident in other EU countries. It should also be seen as a wake-up call to all of us that the citizens of Britain were not satisfied with business as usual. There was a lovely quote by former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at around the same time when he tried to express the disconnection between citizens and European institutions. He said it is important that we emphasise and reprioritise the Europe of kindergartens, music and museums over the Europe of banks and bureaucrats, which had become dominant in the public mind.

Other colleagues have talked about the idea of a social Europe, which is in keeping with the vision of a Europe built on the values of inclusivity, pluralism, diversity and solidarity. That people want to feel more solidarity comes through very strongly in the feedback from citizen engagement. They want to feel solidarity with equality laws and social protection systems that set us apart from other developed countries. That is the vision of Europe we need to assert in the face of the challenge posed by Brexit and the clear hostility to the European project that we saw evidenced in Britain. While we are seeking to assert that conceptual or ideological vision of a social Europe and trying to connect more with citizens through that vision, we also have to be mindful of the practical reality of the difficulty and challenge of negotiating with or against a Government that does not appear to have a vision of its own for what it wants out of the negotiations. We are all mindful of the comments by EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier last week at the all-island civic forum in Dundalk about the real risk that no deal may be reached at the impending June summit, even though we all know this deadline is a vital stepping stone to the pressing October deadline. That real risk is most pressing for us in the context of the Border.

While, as I have said, there is very little humour in Brexit or in any discussion of Brexit, I am grateful to Alison O'Connor for directing me - I urge others to look at it too - to the excellent @BorderIrishaccount on Twitter which has some very amusing observations about the impact of Brexit on the Border. There is one particularly amusing tweet where the Irish Border speaks of itself as taking swimming lessons in case it ends up in the middle of the Irish Sea. Light-hearted moments aside, there is a fundamental contradiction, which has been described as magical thinking on the British side, in the suggestion that Britain will leave the customs union and yet still be able to maintain a frictionless border. The sort of so-called solutions that Theresa May has been proposing are clearly in that realm of magical thinking, such as the notion of a customs arrangement which would be the customs union in all but name or the notion of digital or virtual borders. These are the difficulties in trying to grapple with negotiations when a negotiating party has no coherent vision.

I wanted to make those brief remarks. The return to the idea of the future of Europe and the reassertion of the pro-European sentiment among Irish citizens is very heartening to see. The Minister of State referred to the Red C poll that shows that support for EU membership here is at an all-time high of 92%. We can take heart from that but we need to be mindful of the difficulties with connection and a lack of transparency. There is a perception that there is too much bureaucracy at the heart of the European project and too little real democratic accountability from those involved in making decisions in Brussels and Strasbourg and those of us here in the nation state, as well as in national parliaments. I am delighted we have this opportunity. National parliaments play a vital role. We were all reminded of that this week with the House of Lords voting and making some very significant changes to the way in which the Brexit legislation is travelling through the British Parliament.