 This event is part of our new project on the future of the EU 27, which is a project that the Institute is running with the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the idea is to kind of do long-term research and discussions over Ireland's future within the EU. So the reason that the YPN will be involved, and this is obvious that obviously people here are the future of Ireland and the EU, and we want to get to people's perspectives. So we're going to start with Jacinda Creighton, who's going to give an introduction of kind of her views on Europe and Ireland's position, and then afterwards we're going to open it up to a general discussion. So feel free to ask a question, but also we want to hear your views and your opinions on what you think the future of the EU should be or will be, and also how Ireland needs to position itself in that. So I'm sure everybody knows who Jacinda Creighton is, she's a former TD and Minister for European Affairs, and during that time was a very important time for Ireland within the EU, and negotiating the EU I'm a fade-out, and also during the presidency of the, Ireland's presidency of the Council. So a very important time. And now she has recently set up Vulcan Consulting, which is a EU Affairs consultancy. So there's very, very few people in Ireland who are as well positioned to talk about this topic. So we're very happy to have you here today. Thank you so much. Okay, well, I suppose I might just give a few of my own views, and then I really would be very interested to have a good and hopefully a deep engagement, and maybe some of what I will say might provoke some of that, or indeed you might give me something to think about, which would be very welcome. So I suppose I should nail my colours to the mast at the outset. I am committed European. I am very passionately in favour of and a believer in Ireland's place at the heart of Europe. That's not to say that I don't critically engage with the European debate, that I think everything is perfect, it's far from it, but I think it's a really important starting point. You know, I come to that point of view, I hope, in an informed fashion, because I have seen and I have been involved in the European decision-making process, and I'm also a student of history, and I believe that it has been a massively important force across the continent from the point of view of peace, prosperity, and obviously from Ireland's own national perspective has been hugely important in contributing to both social and economic development in this state. And so, and I suppose, I hope part of that view is indicated by the fact that Ireland is consistently in Eurogrammatical polls, and indeed in polls carried out domestically here by the European movement and others, the most pro-European country, our citizens are most in favour of membership of the European Union, and I think that that's a reflection of what a success it has been from our point of view. But I suppose we live in turbulent times and this is a timely exercise, I guess, in that we are faced with a huge conundrum in the European Union and no more so than from an Irish perspective because of Brexit, because it impacts on us far more profoundly than any other EU member state. But it also impacts on the overall direction of the Union, obviously, because the UK has had a particular influence on the European project over the last 43, 44 years since it joined, some of it positive and some of it not. But things are going to change very profoundly when the UK leaves and that will impact all of Europe, not just Ireland, obviously. And I suppose, I mean my observation as somebody, I was involved in the Convention on the Future of Europe, which led to the Constitutional Treaty, so I was selected by the Irish government through the National Youth Forum when I was in Young Flagell to participate in the Youth Convention, along with a guy called Leo Bradford, I don't know if any of you know him, and Averill Power, who was in Fina Fall at the time and a number of others. And at that time, you know, this was obviously the debate, it was the future of Europe, it was how the European Union moved ahead and a lot of the big ideas contained in that ended up in the Constitution, rejected by France and the Netherlands and a couple of others, ended up becoming the Lisbon Treaty, rejected by Ireland, but then subsequently we changed our mind. And obviously there were developments in the European project, but not quite as ambitious as had originally been intended after the conclusion of the Convention, so it's funny we're back having essentially the same debate again, whatever it is, 15 years later. And I think throughout the last 15 years, we've obviously been through existential crisis, we've been through major, major challenges, which begs the question at different stages, would the European Union survive, would the Eurozone survive, was the whole thing which is going to implode, and a lot of people hoped and believed it would. And it didn't, and not because the European Union necessarily handled a lot of those crises as well as the code or should, but I think because of a common belief across the Union that we needed it to survive and we wanted it to survive. And I think, you know, given that we've been through what we've been through since 2008, I'm actually quite confident and optimistic about the future of the European project, because I think if we could survive the Euro crisis, we can pretty much survive anything, because it was so profound and so existential. And what it has done is it has highlighted the need for deeper and closer cooperation at European level. And you know, it's funny because, particularly since Emmanuel Macron set out his vision for the future of Europe, slightly watered down, I think, from what was leaked in advance, but still a pretty bold ambition for Europe, most of which I would, or a lot of which I would agree with. The reaction in Ireland has been predictable. It has been defensive. It has been, let's close our ears to this. We don't really want to talk about it. It has been largely negative. That is extraordinary considering we are the most pro-European citizens in the European Union. And I'm getting a bit tired of it, I suppose. I'm getting a bit tired of the debate in this country around Europe, which tends to centre on two things. One is we don't want tax formalisation. So we want, you know, we want to exercise vetoes. We want to say no to that, and we want to block things. And on the other hand, we want, and this debate will start very soon, through the multi-animal financial framework process, the budgetary process, we want more money. We want money for farmers. We want money for roads. We want money for, you know, we want transfers, basically. And I think that's a very reductive kind of approach. I don't think it's going to be sustainable for much longer. And I think it really doesn't do us much of a service. I think it undersells our potential and our capacity as Irish citizens and European citizens and as a member state of the European Union. So I think we need to start re-assessing and re-evaluating and having a different conversation. What I would like to see, and this is obviously a really important part of the process to know, this project through the IAEA and the 2020 First, is a real engagement on what we actually want to see in the future composition of the European Union. I don't think we can set out a whole set of sort of ambitions and expect them to happen or expect to reach agreement at EU level overnight. The nature of the European project is incremental. It has to be because of the diversity of opinion and the composition of it and the size of it. But we have to, we as a country, within the EU, have to start setting out a view on where we want it to go. And you know, I know it's a bit of a cliché, a phrase which Jean-Claude Juncker I think ran his campaign on a couple of years ago and has reiterated and has kind of been the mantra of the European Commission in recent years, which is we need to do the big things better. We need to do them more closely together and we need to, we need to do less of the little things. In other words, the sort of things that niggle people and annoy people, bureaucracy, red tape, straight bananas, bendy bananas, whatever, less of that stuff and more of the security and defence cooperation, more of the big ambitious ideas around, you know, environment, climate change, those sort of things. And I think there's something in that actually. I mean, it is the very point of federalism. I'm a federalist. People use federalism as though it's a bad word. Federalism, to me, is the ideal in democracy because it means subsidiarity. It means that you, you know, you keep decision making as close to the people as you can. So you do as much at local level, as much at regional level, as much at national level, and then as much at European level as is necessary. And we've never really come to terms with that. We've never really grasped it. But I think that that is the right approach. And I think it's the approach that we need to, we need to, not just push, but we need to spell out and articulate a little bit more clearly through this debate. So I suppose from Arlen's point of view, I mean, it's not for me. I'm just one citizen to sort of determine what our vision of Europe should be. But we need to start having a national conversation about it pretty quickly. I think for me, one example of an area where we definitely need much deeper and much closer cooperation is in economic cooperation. You can't run a monetary union without closer cooperation on fiscal issues. And we learned that through the financial crisis, we saw how the stability and growth pact was abused by many member states, and particularly the large ones that contributed to significant challenges throughout the course of the last 10 years. We, you know, we've seen really ineffectual management of public finances in a range of member states, including our own. And we have seen the disadvantage that peripheral countries have to live by. And we have to find a way to address that. It's not going to be feasible or credible to continue sort of trundling along as we have done. There will definitely need to be much greater, much more coordinated to drive toward banking union and closer economic cooperation if the currency is to thrive and if it is to benefit all of us as citizens of the union. So in that sense, I agree with Manuel Macron. I don't believe that that necessarily has to mean tax harmonisation. I think it does mean we need some form of budget at Eurozone level, some sort of a fund. We have the ESM, but it's a crisis fund, but a fund that can actually be used in a more practical way. And we need to start building towards that now. We need to have a better way of dealing with future banking crises. And we need to have a mechanism to sustain our currency into the future for the benefit of all of the member states and all of our citizens. And that's a debate that we don't really like to have in this country, but it's one that I think we need to have. Likewise, when it comes to security and defence issues. Macron's speech was interesting, because he's, you know, he's talking about the need to be able to mobilize troops in a crisis, but actually we have that capacity, we have EU battle groups, which were signed up to, it kind of makes a bit of a joke of our so called neutrality. I know we talk about it virtuously all the time, but we're not really neutral. I think we proved in our support for intervention in Kosovo. What was it 25 years ago? That we're not, we're not really, we're not for 20 years ago. We're not, we're not really neutral in this country. We like it because it makes us feel good about ourselves. We like to talk about it and talk down to others about it. But but in reality, we need common security and defence in Europe, we benefit from it. And we probably should be contributing to it. So there is there is a lot of work to do around that. In areas like practical areas like counter counterterrorism, which is an area that I do a lot of work in at the moment. You know, we are hugely exposed in Ireland. And we don't really have a full understanding of that because we don't really share intelligence. We don't we're not really our police force is not really interoperable with others across the union. And we need to address those deficiencies and shortcomings. These are sensitive questions of so called sovereignty, obviously, but if we're to protect our citizens, the best way we can do that most effective way we can do that is by cooperating with other EU member states. So they're the kind of big issues that we need to be cooperating on. And there are issues where you know, there will always be controversy, there will always be, you know, inflammatory rhetoric. But I think we need to actually engage with those EU members and debate and work on them. And, you know, I have been involved in a lot of debates recently with it's funny, there's one political party on this island that has opposed every single EU referendum since 1972, which is now pro European, because it suits our political purposes in Northern Ireland. And they now say, well, we like Europe, but we don't really like the Europe that we have, because we want social Europe. And it's this is a kind of a neocon Europe that we're living in. I mean, I just find that funny. And I think it's a debate that or it's a it's a it's a line that we really have to challenge because, you know, there is no continent on the globe, there is no where in the world with the sort of social protections and social transfer is that we benefit from in Europe. If you look at Africa, if you look at the United States, if you look at Asia, there is nowhere as social as Europe. And this this this sort of rhetoric and this sloganeering that we are subjected to on a constant basis by people who I think just lack any sort of imagination in terms of a political argument would forward really needs to be challenged because because we do have a social model in Europe. Obviously, there's diversity across different member states, there's different approaches. But but overall, the protections, the guarantees and the rights that our citizens enjoy are stronger than any other part of the world. That's not to say they can't be improved, they can. But but I think, you know, the point always has to be made that you have to have economic growth. And you have to have wealth in order in order to be able to provide those sort of social safety nets and protections that that we want in all of our societies. And that is, I mean, there is definitely a debate to be had around that. In terms of levels of particular youth unemployment. I mean, obviously, it's declining across across the European Union, there have been really positive indicators over the last year in particular. But there's still a lot of work to do on that. And there's an awful challenges are in a significant challenge as well, in terms of just communicating the benefits of the European Union, which unfortunately, the institutions are absolutely diabolical at doing, and member states don't bother doing it because it's not really in their interest to do because they're much rather member state governments, I mean, they're much more interested in claiming credit for anything positive that happens themselves rather than attributing it to to our membership of the European Union, except, of course, when there's a referendum to be passed in them.