 Efallai os ydych chi'n gweld iawn i ymweld, maen nhw'n gof ar fy mod i'w dweud môl, mae'n o falchau'n gweithio gwrs. Dwi'n fawr i dda o'n gweithio gwaith Cathlen Day, mae'r welir iawn o'r dda, mae'n gweithio'n gwirionedd i gyd ddweud i'u ummeu, felly mae'n gweithio'n gweithio gweithio gael â'r ddweud. Yn gyfin, yn gwylio'r ad lle hefyd yn ei wneud ar y cyffredinol hynny. I'm sure she has great insights to shed on what's happening. The format this evening, Catherine's going to speak for about 50 and 20 minutes. Then we'll open up to the floor and that session will be off the record. So Catherine's initial portion will be fully on the record and then we go into an off the record session. Okay, Catherine? Thank you very much. Good evening everybody. I'm sorry some of you have to stand but hopefully you can hear me at the back. So I'm delighted to be here as Dara says it's a particularly timely week to be talking about the changing of the guard and the priorities for the EU. And I'm going to talk both about some of the policy issues and also some of the processes. But what I want to do is for the context of what I'm going to say is to say that I think the commission but also all the new heads of institutions who are taking up new jobs in the coming weeks at the European level are really having to work in a context when there is a battle going on for what kind of society do we want to live in, what kind of politics do we want to have. And I'll talk a little bit about the pressures the EU is under internally and from outside. But I think that's the geopolitical context. We see in the United States, we see in Russia, we see with China the return of the cult of the strong man, the one leader. And it's very obvious that in Europe we don't have one leader. That sometimes makes things complicated, it takes longer to arrive at a decision. But in the end I think it's a better way of working by compromise, trying to bring people on board and not being dependent on the whims and the quirks of just one person. But really a lot of what the European institutions will have to do in the next five years has to be understood in that context because there is a battle going on for what will the EU be like in the future. Will it go back to individual countries run by strong, usually men, but not exclusively I suppose, or will we manage to find the confidence in ourselves to continue with the model that we have and will we be able to make it sufficiently attractive to the voters. And if you keep that context in mind I think it already explains some of the choices that in particular Earthliff under Lyon has been reflecting in her choice of commissioners this week. It is true I think that the European Union is feeling, despite Brexit, is feeling a bit better about itself at the moment because I think Brexit is actually making the general population as well as the political class across Europe realise again that we can't take for granted what we have taken for granted, that the good things that come from the EU won't automatically be there if you tear up the EU. And so I think this is not necessarily a bad time for a changing of the guard at the head of the institutions and hopefully new people will be able to bring new solutions to old problems. And I'm going to start with the old problems because most of the big issues facing the new leaders have been around for quite a while. And in my experience national positions don't change very much over time or with changes of government except in moments of crisis. So a lot of the parameters of the problems will be there. What one has to hope is that new people coming with new energy and with new mandates will find it in them and together to find new solutions. So I want to start first with the issues because that's more important than the processes and the institutions. And I think one of the first challenges is going to be to recommit to the values that embody the European Union. They are under threat from inside. You can see all the difficulties with countries like Poland, Hungary, Romania where there is a challenge to the multilateral way in which the EU works but also to the primacy of EU law and general wanting to take the benefits without wanting to have to accommodate some of the inconveniences of membership. That also brings the benefits. So there are also challenges from the extreme right in several countries. Look at the national front in France. Look at the Netherlands. Look at the rise of the right in Germany. So these are all internal challenges which are reflecting old problems but also with people who are given new impetus by the populism of Trump even by the mood in the UK over Brexit etc. And then the actual existence of the EU itself is under threat from outside. I mean I think President Trump doesn't make much secret of his disdain for the EU. And he wouldn't be at all unhappy if it collapsed and he's rather hoping that Brexit will be the beginning of the break up of the EU. Similarly, Putin would much prefer to deal with 27 smaller individual European countries rather than to have to deal with the bloc that is the EU. And the Chinese have yet another variant on that but also are ambivalent I would say in their attitude towards the size of the EU, the way the EU works and even the existence of the EU. So values I think is a very big issue that the new heads of the institutions are going to have to find a way to convince the public that the values are enduring and that the EU has the capacity to defend its values. Then there are what I've put under the heading of existential threats. First of all climate change and you will have seen that President von der Leyen has set two overarching priorities for her commission. The first is dealing with climate change and she has said that the commission will produce a new green deal in 100 days that the EIB should become a climate bank. I think that will be very interesting to see if they fully take to that new role. She has also talked about carbon border taxes which I think are quite a difficult issue and maybe even the kind of false good idea we will see but we can come back to that if you're interested in discussing it in more detail. Also migration. Here too she has said that she will work for humane borders for a new pact on migration to build up the European border and coast guard to build up front-ex etc. I was very interested in her speech to the European Parliament in July when she told a story about a Syrian refugee who she had taken into her family and who was now doing very well and spoke German and was studying and all the rest of it and I was very struck at the end of that part of her speech she said and one day he hopes to go home. If you look at that combined with the outpouring of criticism from the Parliament over the fact that one of the vice presidential portfolios which is actually to deal with migration doesn't have the word migration in the title and a lot of people in the Parliament are getting very agitated about the fact that she has called it defending or protecting our European way of life. So I think that that's going to be interesting to see how that gets worked out. Do we have a migration policy that welcomes people into Europe permanently providing we can choose who comes in and who doesn't? Or do we still see it as managing a refugee crisis where someday they will go home again? That's going to be one of the big issues even here in Ireland where we take a relatively small number it's going to be an issue in the future. I wasn't sure whether to put this under existential or more economic and political but it's the whole issue of social policy and here too in her setting out her priorities she has talked about a just transition fund which I think is quite important that regions or sections of society that are getting left behind whether it's because of damage, whether it's because of trade deals, whether it's because of technological development but that implies a beefing up of the help so that's precisely so that nobody is left behind. She also has said things about having a minimum wage, European unemployment benefits, social re-insurance scheme, she wants to triple erasmus, she wants to have a child guarantee, she wants to activate more the youth guarantee etc etc etc etc and again that's a political response to the rise of populism in Europe and the rise of a kind of them and us feeling which is being actively worked up by the more extreme political parties and I think that is going to be very important and it's actually one of the few areas where I think the departure of the UK will have a positive effect on the EU agenda because the UK has been so anti any development of the social agenda that it has really contributed, I wouldn't say caused but contributed to quite a mismatch between very strong economic powers at European level very weak social powers and the feeling that Brussels doesn't care about ordinary people cares more about bankers than it does about ordinary people and so on, we all know the song but I think if she really puts a strong emphasis on the social dimension of European membership I think that will hopefully be positive in trying to bring, validate the agenda of the centre rather than the extremes. There are lots of economic challenges and I'm just going to mention them very very quickly and then in the discussion afterwards we can come back to them if you want to. First of all one of the most immediate tasks for all the new institutions is going to be to fix the next budget of the European Union. The seven year budget that we have been working on runs out at the end of next year. Now leaving aside the fact that if we have no deal with the UK we will have a hole in the budget for 2020, we also have to work out post Brexit what kind of budget does the EU want. I think again the negotiations would be much easier without the UK, they have always been the most intransigent on the budget. They've also been the smartest, I'd say they are the only member state that's able to second guess the commission on the numbers, no other member state is really, it's such a complicated budget, no other member state is really able to work out the implications of tweaking it here or tweaking it there but the British Treasury has always been past master at that. The budget negotiations are always excruciating but this time I think there will be an extra political dimension and you can see very clear warming up of a showdown of Eastern Europe. If you don't share the values of the European Union, why should the Western European countries be generous to the east if the east doesn't share the basic values? That can be very ugly but it's also sometimes necessary to spell out a few home truths I think. There will be more pressure on tax which will be difficult for this country but I think the pressure on tax isn't only coming from inside the EU, it's also coming very strongly from the Americans and while you can negotiate inside the EU on how and when things should happen, the Americans or this particular administration are quite capable of pulling the rug from under everybody overnight so I think all of that combined is going to make the tax issue very very challenging. Now the second big overarching theme that President von der Leyen has set is the whole digital agenda and again that can be very technical but it's also about societal change. How do we adapt to the revolution that's going on and the issues will run from privacy. I mean I think after a lot of disparagement even the GDPR has now turned out actually to be a rather good vehicle and has shown that the Europeans have done more and are willing to do more to protect individual privacy than any other block in the world but it will run from issues like that to artificial intelligence. These are not areas that traditional lawmakers are familiar with or even able to keep up with because the speed of change is much faster than traditional lawmaking so there will be a big challenge for the commission and from the commission on then into the rest of the EU decision making chain. Trade, another big area, the engine of our growth and prosperity. Globalisation has not been an unmixed blessing, it has a downside but it has lifted literally billions out of poverty and it has been very good for Europe broadly speaking as well but now we see a tendency to retrench, to be lured back by the siren calls of protectionism and again it will be a big challenge for the next commission and for Phil Hogan in his new portfolio to try to keep the multilateral system going. Europe believes in a multilateral rules based system rather than the might of the right school of politics but we have to convince enough of the rest of the world to stick with it and to breathe new life into the WTO so that's going to be a big challenge and it's also going to be a challenge to keep Europe open because there are lots of protectionist tendencies inside Europe as well and I think it's one of the things that does worry me about the departure of the UK they were the big country that was committed to keeping Europe open it's much easier to persuade French and German politicians to go a bit more protectionist and that will be a challenge in the future for the smaller countries that rely on the open trading model to keep the EU open to the outside and I personally am worried about all the talk now about having European champions and basically closing off the openness that used to be there having less confidence in our own ability to compete internationally so these are all kinds of pressures that the new commission will have to find the right way of managing lots of political pressures too I mean first of all managing Brexit it seems to be never ending there is a need to deal with that and it will take several years whatever happens but also to begin to think about what kind of new relationship do we want to have with the UK outside of the European Union obviously we want them to be close, we want a close economic relationship the UK and France are the two European countries that have some kind of meaningful defence capability we will certainly I think want to have links there I think also the British will probably discover how much more European they are than some of them think at the moment when they're outside because if they look around all the international issues they will see time and again that they will probably be more comfortable in supporting European positions than they will be in supporting American or any other positions you can think of but that's going to take time to work out how to do it and it's going to need the building of a careful relationship which is less than membership but close to a very like-minded ally from lots of points of view there's also going to be a challenge of managing the UK outside the EU if it does decide to turn itself into a kind of European Singapore and slash its corporation tax, cut environmental standards not live up to the high food standards that they have at the moment and there certainly are people in the UK who advocate that as a way of remaining competitive outside of the EU that will, you can say it's their business but it will have a big impact on the EU as one of its trading partners so I come back again to a lot of this is yes it's about a power struggle but it's also about trying to shape what tomorrow's world will be like and the EU will have to be clever in terms of how it responds to provocation, challenge and opportunity all rolled into one maybe I'll stop there, I want to keep an eye on the time and just say something about the institutional changes because you would expect me given my role as Secretary-General of the Commission for 10 years to say that institutions matter but they do because institutions endure, individuals matter too but they come and go but institutions matter because they can carry on from one change of government to the next one change of commission to the next the general trends and ideas that are enabled the European Union to deliver on its promises and its agenda and we've seen in the composition of the new commission a concern overall for balance for political balance so you have three vice presidents representing the three big political tendencies the Christian Democrats, the Socialists and the Liberals you have gender balance which I think is quite an achievement of underlying because the two presidents I worked for had enormous difficulty in getting the member states to give them one third female commissioners so she really has succeeded and if you remember President Juncker five years ago had to threaten to resign having been nominated because he couldn't get enough female commissioners so it really is a big step forward and she has also been very concerned and careful to try to get geographic balance and to make sure that she has involved commissioners from Eastern Europe in important portfolios and with vice presidential portfolios to try to show that she wants to have a single commission to be a commission for a single Europe and not to go down the path of old divisions between East and West I think that it's not a done deal yet we will see it's become a kind of almost hunting tradition now that the European Parliament takes out one or two commissioners if they would be satisfied with the change in the title of the portfolio of one or two that would be cheap at the price but we'll see what happens when the hearings start and sometimes people trip themselves up or skeletons come out of the closet or whatever so it's not a done deal but we will see I think the shape of the commission is clear the portfolio titles are interesting as is the creation of a portfolio on defence and space that is a sign of the times to some extent it's also a reflection of losing the UK and it's also a question of American pressure to say that the Europeans have to step up more to the plate and pay for their own defence and I think also probably a feeling that America is a less reliable ally so we perhaps had better invest more in our own defence capacity for the future I think it will be interesting to see how such a balanced driven commission will actually settle down compared to the current commission she has made one change which I think will prove to be important and I hope will help to get more focus and direction in the work of the commission and that is in addition to having eight vice presidents she has given two, three of them the power to directly intervene in what DGs are doing and that has been a difficulty up to now with both commissioners and directors general kind of conspiring not to tell the president what they are working on working with external representatives lobbies et cetera and hoping to kind of get something developed before the centre gets to know about it I think if you have vice presidents like Tirmann's Investigator and Dumbroskis directly working with DGs alongside their commissioner it can lead to friction but it can also lead to I think much more coherent policy making and I would hope that the system will be able to move the indication more to the coherent side because I do worry the last two commissions have worked very hard to try to limit the number of priorities the commission engages in because if you have 150 priorities on your agenda you cannot explain to anybody what it is you are trying to achieve if you have a limited number of priorities that you can show the machinery is behind then you have some chance of delivering on it and being able to explain to the public and of course the new commission is going to have to work with a new parliament where a more fragmented parliament than previously because you now have three and a half main parties the half being the greens so it will take more work at compromise it will probably make the compromises more complicated and more difficult to explain to the public at a time when everybody wants a simple sound bite to explain what's Europe doing, what's it all about it will be more complicated but I still think that the centre will achieve majorities on the big and important issues and of course the first battle will be to decide do they approve the commission or do they take out one or two commissioners immediately followed by the battle on the future budget which is where the parliament does have a lot of power and will have the opportunity to exercise it if it's able to get its act together and to organise very briefly we also have a new president of the European Council somebody steeped in a European federalist tradition so you can expect him I think to be keen on what generally people talk about as more Europe but I think also being a Belgian politician somebody who will be very pragmatic and who I believe will be skilled in the usual Belgian talent of finding compromises but it will be very important that the president of the commission the president of the European Council work together I've seen when they didn't and when they did and the difference is enormous so hopefully that will work and then not forgetting the new president of the ECB it will be interesting to see whether Christine Lagarde once she gets there is more French or more IMF or maybe hopefully a combination of both I think but that will also be a change because the European Council has been got very used to Mario Draghi over the last several years through the whole Euro crisis and we still will have more work to do on consolidating the Euro on looking at whether or not we need an economic stimulus package depending also on the fallout from Brexit etc so a lot of new people coming to tackle old problems but as I said hopefully in a new way and with the stakes as high as they've ever been because not only does the EU need to reach out to its citizens and convince voters that it is the best way forward but also to be able to resist the intense pressure from outside to try to undermine and destabilise it at a time when it's going to lose an important member in lots of ways and I'll stop here in lots of ways the departure of the UK which will be a huge loss but it will also lead to I think a more coherent EU in the sense that it will be much more continental and one of the things I'd like to have a discussion with you about is to what extent do you think Ireland is ready for that and what do we need to do both in our let's say business political professional lives to make sure that Ireland locks into that more continental EU and how are we going to bring our citizens along that journey because at the moment everybody is super European in all the opinion polls but the first thing that will go wrong and inevitably things do go wrong we could then have quite a backlash here so it would be interesting to have a discussion with you about how do you think we can get more ready and sustain a much higher level of public interest in the EU and our involvement in it once the immediate focus of Brexit begins to decline which hopefully one of these days it will so thank you very much for your attention