 Hi my name is Michael Collins and I have the privilege of being the director general of this wonderful institute, the Institute of International and European Affairs here in North Great Georgia Street. And we're delighted to see so many people here this evening and welcome in particular to our distinguished guests, particularly of course Eleanor Sharpton and Justice Lee McKekney and of course President Philip Nolan from Maneuth, from whom you'll be hearing very very shortly. We are delighted and we're thrilled to cooperate with Maneuth University and hosting this event, this indeed important event, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Maneuth Law School. It may not be the oldest university, the oldest law school in the world but 10 years is good too, 20 years will be better, 50 years will be really really good and 100 years will be spectacular but in any event. So congratulations to everybody associated with the law school in Maneuth in reaching and marking this important milestone. I wish you all the very best as the school strives and I'm sure reaches levels of continuing success in the years ahead. The IA is particularly honored to host our keynote speaker, Advocate General Eleanor Sharpton and to welcome her particularly to the Institute here this evening. Her reputation precedes her. Indeed I was reading a little bit about her background and apart from being in awe it made some very very entertaining reading as well. Eleanor I know that your career path has been at times both challenging and demanding and indeed demanding more than a fair share of persistence and determination. This makes your success in reaching the position of Advocate General all the more commendable and indeed impressive and we salute your success and are delighted that you can share this time with us here in the heart of Dublin here at the Institute this evening. Eleanor I know that your friends call you Leo. You're among friends tonight so we're going to call you Leo as well if we may but whether we call you Leo or Eleanor you're welcome here is profound and it's sincerely held. I now want to hand over to the President of Maynooth, Philip Nolan whom I've had the privilege of meeting before but Leo, Philip you're very very welcome. Thank you. Michael thank you so much and it's a real pleasure to be here at the final event to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the the School of Law at Manitou University beautifully coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the enactment or the coming into effect of the Lisbon Treaty. It's in polite to disagree with your host but I'm going to do it anyway. 10 years is great and in fact 20 years or 50 years isn't necessarily better and my point is I had the privilege of appointing Professor Michael Daherty as head of the Department of Law some seven years ago six six years ago. Michael was the third permanent member of staff in the department. It's now a department of 30 so it's grown enormously in that very short space of time to deliver really top quality education to a whole new generation of students of law and the trick I think for the school which is it's had the great privilege of assembling itself over a short period of time so it's very fresh with very talented scholars in it and very innovative approaches to teaching. The trick will be to be around for 50 or 100 years without becoming stale maintaining that spirit of innovation maintaining that sense of drive and scholarship so I want to pay tribute first of all to Michael Daherty's leadership which made that possible but I really want to pay tribute to the entire staff of the department. I've never seen a group of people put their shoulders to the wheel so enthusiastically and to such great effect and equally we have very many friends and supporters. Many people in this room have been friends and supporters of the department so I just want to express my gratitude to those three categories of people the leadership, the staff and the very many supporters and I do want to conclude by welcoming and thanking him for his support Mr. Justice Liam McKekney who's chairing the event at Justice of the Supreme Court and to also say how delighted I am to have with us a jurist of such distinction in Eleanor Sharpton the advocate general of the Court of Justice of the European Union. I never attended all events without enjoying it and without learning something so I'm very much looking forward to this evening and want to conclude by thanking each and every one of you for your support. Thank you very much indeed. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. May I firstly and thank everybody who's been involved in inviting me to chair this conference this evening and in particular being here to share the same platform as Eleanor Sharpton. You probably know as much as what you need to know about Eleanor and it is all there in print which can be downloaded at any given time but there are a couple of snippets maybe that might have slipped your research tool. I should say that from time to time when you're introducing somebody it may become slightly desirable to embellish one's career or to say something with poetic license in relation to it. It certainly does not apply under any circumstances to Eleanor and you might know that her mother was in Cove, County Cork and that if her grandmother had been on time for to take up or take it into Titanic neither she or her grandmother would be here now and indeed the lateness of the with regard to marine matters attaches to Eleanor herself because she was laid for and missed a herald of free enterprise in Zebra some time ago which of course went down with the loss of all lives. In any event she was born in London her family moved to South Polo when she was six and on to Geneva and then Vienna. In Vienna she exhibited for signs of being a serious talent in classical music and to this day she played the viola amongst many other instruments in an amateur choir in Luxembourg. She studied in King's College, Cambridge 73 to 77 economics language and the law called her the middle bar and practiced as a barrister for two different periods 80 to 87 and 1990 to 2005 taking a silk in the intervening period and she was the legal secretary in the chambers of the advocate general Sir Gordon Slin who later became a judge of the court and she saw him in fact in two different capacities. She spent one year when he was advocate general and or maybe two years advocate general and one year when he was when he was a judge so it is fitting in fact that she herself should have followed in his footsteps and become appointed advocate general in 2006. Apart from a very short period of time she's the longest serving advocate general in the court. In addition she has a glittering academic career and she has lectured in many places and she has several degrees she has several honorships and fellowships of various colleges and from the time she became advocate general in January 2006 she has I believe and I've counted all of these individually delivered 337 opinions in the past 13 years are thereabouts and now that we have passed the 31st of January the 31st of October and she's still advocate general let's hope that there's another couple of hundred opinions in her and as you can see from the presentation tonight she's going to speak a little bit about the past the present and the future and of really where we are in terms of the situation presently and can I make it clear at the outset that what she's going to say and by way of a presentation is on the record and but some when that is finished they will be about 30 minutes of their abouts for question and answer and the chat and rules apply and there are several good reasons for that and they will become clear when we start exploring different areas and where frankness will enlighten you much greater than the fact if one had to be overly careful about what one says so ladies and gentlemen can I please introduce you to Anna gentlemen thank you one and all for the there's very kind introductory phrases it's always embarrassing standing up to speak after such a glowing account which you think yes they're all waiting for me to demonstrate that I can fly backwards through the air and you may you may be disappointed in that regard now I started my intellectual life in fact as a classicist with with Latin Greek and so when I was preparing this talk I thought right I will imitate one of the clearest and subtlest of the ancient narrators Juan Julius Caesar and I will divide my narrative like gall in just three parts to quote it properly Galeas is Omnis de Visa in Partis Très so I'm going to begin with the past with you know the story so far I then move on to suggest a possible way of looking at and taking stock of some of the present and then of course with considerable trepidation I grasp my crystal ball firmly in both hands and I suggest what what may be some of the challenges facing us in the future and how perhaps we need to set about addressing them if the European project which I'm proud and happy to have served all my professional life is to evolve and to prosper so let's begin by looking back looking back to try to understand the past it's almost embarrassing to have to recall this but you know actually the European project started in a very specific place and with a very specific reason for existing it began in the shadow of the Second World War and it began with devastation with destruction the latest in a series of ever worsening conflicts on the continent of Europe the antithesis of the civilized Europe that we like to think that we belong to not for nothing I suggest does the Schumann Declaration in 1950 open with the words world peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it not for nothing does the preamble of the cold and steel treaty the precursor to the EEC treaty and the your atom treaty not for nothing does that preamble state that the signatories are and I quote resolve to substitute for age old rivalries the merging of their essential interests to create by establishing an economic community the basis for a broader and deeper community among people's long divided by bloody conflicts and to lay the foundations for institutions which will give direction to a destiny hence forward shared it's very passionate language and perhaps it does no harm to remember that right at the start of this story because since the foundation of the coal and steel community and then the EEC which became the EC and there's now the EU of course statement of the obvious we haven't had a conflict between member states we have seen on our borders one might think a little bit too close for comfort we have seen a bear 30 years ago a new conflagration in the former Yugoslavia over there in the Balkans remember where World War One began and of course more recently we have been dealing I suggest rather imperfectly with millions of displaced persons fleeing another nearby conflict in Syria what we refer to these days as the refugee crisis so please the first and most fundamental gift that the EU has given us and it's a gift that we tend totally to forget these days is an insurance policy against war in Europe and I make no apologies for saying I think it's particularly important to remember that here in Ireland because we know very well here that the Good Friday Agreement which brought a merciful end to the bloodshed in the north that agreement was built on the fact that the UK and the Republic of Ireland were both member states of the European Union that's how it was possible to make that agreement and yet during a certain referendum in 2016 during the run-up to the referendum and during the months afterwards well I suppose the kindest and politest thing to say would be that there was a kind of Westminster blind spot about the importance of the Good Friday Agreement and doing something in the ensuing negotiations to ensure that we didn't go back to that past of the troubles so over moving on from there over most of the decades of its existence the EU has focused on economics frictionless trade in goods and services which of course involves both the common customers frontier and common regulatory standards across the trading block combined with mutual recognition and this is precisely what we have been so carefully and painstakingly been building through the EU project for decades because it's this combination that allows the total absence of frontier checks between member states and that allows companies to construct elaborate cross-border supply chains, obvious example being the automotive industry and that leads to a wide range of consumer choice coupled with high levels of consumer protection so you know in short the EU has been extremely successful in delivering economic prosperity now there's always a there's always a problem there's always a but but you see unfortunately when you take down the frontiers and you have frontier less free movement of honest citizens that also means potentially enhanced free movement rights for criminals and for security threats and so the EU therefore had to start to accompany that frontier free frictionless trading zone with the flanking measures of creation and development of the area of freedom security and justice AFSJ for short and it's had to put those in place those measures that begin to address the problems that arise precisely if you do successfully dismantle frontiers and frontier controls it's great for free movement of workers it's also fantastic for money laundering drug stealing people trafficking organized crime in general cross-border terrorism and so on and so on and so when you start creating the flanking measures that you need to put in place at a EU level to address those problems now those measures many of them necessarily intrude and I put quotes around the word intrude they necessarily intrude on policy areas that are sensitive because they lie close to traditional concepts of state sovereignty areas like immigration like criminal law like security and very possible for the for that reason there is a certain inbuilt reluctance by member states to cede more power to the EU that was a very quick Michelin style and Pouditoire tour of the past let's move from there to trying to take stock of the present and I would suggest to you that we stand at a kind of crossroads here we have put together within a single customs territory an enormously successful economic single market we have significant mobility of citizens to live and work to study and to retire in member states other than the one in which they happen to have been born and we have these basic flanking measures that deal with much wider issues immigration criminal law security but the collective action in those areas has been perhaps a little bit slow and a little bit cautious and there is a very big hole where this is my european unity european identity and i'm proud of my european identity should be and that's because many of the benefits of the EU have been banked but banked totally invisibly so the average citizen is in fact unaware that he is deriving benefits from EU law and from everything that's been put in place there and i'm going i think the chairman will permit me the time to do the very very brief diversion i'm going to tell you a very short true story in february before the referendum in 2016 that february during what we call the blank week at the court when we don't sit i had removed myself to go skiing in kitsville and i got onto a little gondola there and sitting opposite me is a nice young man wearing the red jacket of the kitsville ski school the ruta toifel so having grown up in in vienna i say very politely to him kru scott to which the answer is um i don't speak german well being naturally curious i explored this a little bit it turned out that he was a very nice young man from from essix he began his skiing career by watching ski sunday on the telly and he thought this was great fantastic so he got on the package holiday thoroughly enjoyed it had a natural talent for skiing and the kitsville ski school had seen a good opportunity because there's an international ski school they've got lots and lots of clients who would appreciate being taught in english and so they had sponsored him and supported him and helped him through his training and qualification and so on so there he was as a ski teacher with the kitsville ski school which is how he spent half his year and the problems about being a lawyer of course is a thing called professional deformation so you take this information in and you think aha free movement of workers six months so i ask him well you know sounds great in fact i'm a bit i'm a bit envious but what do you do the other half of the year oh we said there's no problem because you see back in the uk i trained as a chef and i mean it's really easy i mean all you need is your bundle of knives you take with you and i'm gonna course everyone speaks english so there's no problem and well you know i go off and i fill in down the cost of braver the cost of del sol asks is the eu lawyer to herself so that will be free movement of workers in the winter and freedom to supply services during the summer months so having established that his entire economic existence was built upon the exercise of rights granted under a law and it was quite a long ski lift we had time for this i i said tell me what about this referendum that's coming up in the uk oh yes he said i think we should leave and i'm you know i've just heard a turkey vote for christmas no but really you know i've heard the turkey explain to me that christmas is a wonderful family festival when there is celebration and lots of good food and drink and the turkey has just told me that christmas is a good idea i did spend the remaining two minutes trying to give a sort of eu law 101 course so that he did actually understand what voting leave might entail for him personally and he looked a bit puzzled and a little bit concerned by the time we parted ways but so i mean you know this is the point that the benefits of the project to a very great extent have have been banked and banked invisibly and there is also a basic paradox behind the bigger issues about how much power is at the center and how much power is still with the member states because i mean obviously we want to be kept safe and secure and we want big problems that overflow national borders whether that is immigration or climate change or whatever but the big problems that won't stay inside the national box we want those problems to be managed effectively so maybe europe will need to play a greater role but at the same time the member states do jealously guard their traditional remits and there is also what for want of the better acronym what is called the nimby reflex not in my backyard that particularly applies when there are lots of asylum seekers who have to be looked after because i want to make that illustration indeed precisely from just one area which has given rise to a lot of recent issues and difficult case law which is precisely how to handle the refugee crisis now to do a very summary sketch for this the doubling regulation in its latest incarnation doubling three regulation has a very fine system for what i would call the theoretical balanced allocation of applicants for asylum between all the member states and if asylum seekers were to arrive and be dropped by helicopter equally in each corner of the 28 member states the system would work perfectly we then had a problem because actually that's not the geography of europe and as you know as well as i do in fact there is immense pressure on the southern member states with those non-floating half sinking inflatable boats making their way or not making their way across the Mediterranean but there is also the land route route up the west Balkans coming across the land bridge from turkey and then up along through into Croatia and then and to the rest of the EU and that migration explosion gave rise to some grand case grand chamber cases in in my court particularly case c for 1916 as against Slovenia and case c 646 16 Jafari and then the migration across the mediterranean well leaving aside the issue about when time starts running from those appeared in the menger stave case in case c 670 16 there is the big background issue of whether really and truly it is an irregular crossing of a border if people are rescued in a search and rescue operation and landed on the shores of a coastal member state that borders the mediterranean but it was all of this problem was happening and then there is a reaction of solidarity finally belated that you may say and measures are put in place in order to try to help Italy and Greece two decisions that are taken in september of 2016 decision 2015 1523 and 2015 1601 and they made arrangements for relocating compulsory relocation of applicants for international protection and the numbers are big the first decision is about 40 000 applicants and a week later the number has jumped and you add to that 120 000 applicants for international protection you know there's a big problem and there is a need for solidarity and the next thing happens is an application from Slovakia and Hungary supported by Poland they've been proceedings before the court and try to get the later of the two decisions are nulled these are joint cases 643 15 and 647 15 Slovakia and Hungary against the council and they throw at the argument about everything that you could conceivably imagine it's not very often that a judgment of the court begins with the table of contents but that case does because otherwise you cannot find your way around the text of the judgment and the grand chamber dismissed that application and what then happens well actually member states do not really do very much to put the decisions into force some are better than others some some take you know a few thousands here and there three member states of the four the group that's often called the Visigrad four three states Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic decided that they didn't need to comply with the decision even though its validity had been upheld by the court and so they did not communicate to the commission numbers that they were prepared to take from memory I think one of the three agreed that it was going to take 50 refugees not even refugees 50 applicants and eventually the commission did bring infringement proceedings against those three member states this is cases 715 17 718 17 and 719 17 and obviously if you don't communicate the number of people you're going to take by necessarily and logical extension you don't then take the people and help to process the applications and the essential argument that was being made was because the member state retains responsibility for national security within its territory you can unilaterally decide not to apply an agreed and valid collective measure of solidarity now I discovered before we started the proceedings this evening that some of you have been kind enough to read an opinion that came out on the 31st of October the date was not accidental in which I waxed very passionate about the fact that I think this is absolutely not on and I even use some rather colorful language about the importance of solidarity as the lifeblood of the of the project but obviously we'll see what the court does with it it's now in delivery but but the essential point here is here is a problem that manifestly needs to be solved at EU level you cannot solve it individually at member state level and the story so far unfortunately very clearly indicates and illustrates the weaknesses and limitations of collective action if everyone just looks after their own bailiwick and a checklist and it certainly wouldn't be an exhaustive checklist right but a checklist of what would need to be sorted out in respect of that single problem would surely include such matters as reform to the Dublin 3 regulation what do you do about search and rescue in the Mediterranean to save boatloads of migrants from drowning in the Met what about a collective agreement to share out responsibility for processing those who are rescued and for geographical reasons they're going to be landed in member states that border the Mediterranean rather than in member states that border the Baltic think about the map and developing programs to give more significant levels of aid to the states from which they would be migrants are coming put bluntly you know if the if the prosperous EU does not want to be a magnet for the less fortunate well it needs to help create conditions where there is more incentive for them to stay where they are and it would obviously help if we weren't in a situation where there are major wars happening geographically rather close to where we are and against the background of all of that there is what from an EU 27 perspective there is what is the distraction that is Brexit now I am a Luxembourg as much as I am a Brit and I am here ladies and gentlemen I please I'm very very firmly wearing my Luxembourg hat let's just not be have any confusion on that wearing my Luxembourg hat yes you heard me right Brexit is a distraction seen from an EU 27 perspective the three years since that referendum in 2016 in the UK have been spent discovering that those governing the UK have difficulty in specifying the details of the desired new alternative bilateral relationship a relationship that will simultaneously respect all the red lines that have been pasted painted on the floor and B will lead all the yield all the desired economic and security benefits while see simultaneously leaving the UK entirely free to strike multiple trade deals with other global powers that will naturally be more advantageous to the UK negotiating on its own than the deals that the EU as a global trading power has already signed or is currently negotiating Brexit is a distraction it is a distraction because it has devoured time money resources and effort that Luxembourg had firmly in place that's badly need to be spent on dealing with other matters both nationally within the UK but but within the EU 27 for three million EU 27 citizens who are living and working in the UK for about a million UK citizens who are living and working in the EU 27 these last three years have been a period of personal and economic uncertainty and if I look at the micro level at the little team of people who work with me most of whom are not UK nationals we have seen stress unhappiness and brexit related illness or take their top but brexit has had one positive side effect it has made the rest of us realize just how interconnected our economies now are and how much hitherto invisible benefit does in fact come from that interconnectedness within the EU and it's really interesting if you go to the euro barometer which takes the temperature takes the pulse of how people are feeling about the European project in the different member states it's really interesting to see that nations that were previously a bit euro skeptic for example the the Netherlands for example Denmark in those nations enthusiasm for the EU is now at an all-time high so it's nice to know that there's some benefit that's come out of the brexit process so far I'm going to turn to the third part of this presentation facing the challenges of the future and I begin with an uncomfortable truth the world doesn't owe us a nice comfortable living just because we Europeans we are neither in the colonial imperial world of the 19th century nor in its 20th century aftermath we are firmly launched into the 21st century and in economic terms we live in a world of big players both the existing powers and the emerging powers little checklist might say USA Russia China Japan India Brazil Argentina Korea Canada and you can add your favorite names to that list so to keep our European economy in contention we need a Europe wide strategy for research for innovation and investment we need common rules and standards and incentives and measures to ensure that enterprises encourage has to be but that workers are also protected and we have to have enough people working productively and we have to be good enough at what we collectively do to finance the social care the health care the unemployment benefit the pensions and so on that we consider are essential to respect and look after all members of our society and you know if as is now the case the majority of EU member states share a common currency the euro well there are inevitable implications in terms of monetary and fiscal policy that will need further reflection and elaboration and I'm not going to slide into the economics lecture at this point so there are also as well as all of that all the things we haven't been getting on with because of brexit right there are also some obvious challenges that can only be addressed through EU wide action start the list climate change environmental damage putting together a comprehensive and intelligent policy on migration in the widest sense financing infrastructure and economic support for disadvantaged reasons that would just be the start of the list and make it much much longer stepping even further back if we like living comfortably in a liberal tolerant multicultural democracy we cannot just sit back and assume that that is the natural state of affairs because there is plenty of evidence out there to show that actually it isn't we will have to counter the resurgent populism that has taken root in disaffection and alienation and that is rampant in environments when too many are unskilled probably unemployed have no obvious future and are firmly convinced that they meaning those ones in power do not care a damn about us the victims victim mentality is very dangerous it is only a short step away from let's turn on those others and get our revenge and we owe it to our citizens but also to the third country nationals living peaceably within our borders we owe it to them to keep them safe from harm be that harm individual lawlessness organized crime or terrorist action and that takes you across to the rule of law doesn't it we have to use the collective power of the european union to uphold the rule of law and to curb politicians who rise to power by exploiting and feeding that populism with sound bites and who then try to dismantle any institutional structures that may get in their way there's some judgments of the caught out recently in relation to poland but there's been some interesting things happening in other places as well that show that the rule of law may not be as solidly anchored as we perhaps like it to be and we must repeat must safeguard that rule of law because we saw in germany in 1930s what happens when a populist leader rises to power and then dismantles the legal checks and constitutional guarantees that ensure the balance of power between branches of government and that protect the rights of all including unpopular minorities now i have no idea whether the right model for europe put quotes around that is a single speed model a two speed model or a multi-speed model whether it's the eu plus the ea or whether it's integrated in some other way before our collective attention was distracted by brexit there were some important and thoughtful dialogues some exploration of these issues that were starting to take place and it seems to me that we the eu 27 laksenberger had must not respond to brexit by adopting a europe is our bunker mentality we're going to have to have the courage and the self-confidence to resume those discussions and to think creatively and imaginatively about our shared future i am passionately convinced that we need to find a way of welding europe together of building on the work the genre and robert schumann and comet adana did in the immediate aftermath of the second world war in the past there was an obvious model i mean this nation state often forged its national identity through military prowess through conquest through nationalism and through fostering a sense of superiority over its neighbors and we cannot foster our european identity in that way it is nevertheless crucial that citizens should buy into and own the european project it is vital that it should belong to them rather than be perceived as the abstract and remote creation of a brussel's based elite and i think the communication which is really is not the same thing as indoctrination but communication plays an essential role here because politicians throughout the eu have for decades tended to present everything popular as their own national triumph and everything less popular as an unwelcome interference by brussels and how you present events tends automatically to color how they are received and the wider conclusions that we draw from them let me offer you two illustrations just to make this point imagine imagine that a strong earth tremor causes significant damage in a region of a member state what do you put in the press coverage does that press coverage focus exclusively on photos of distraught villagers and collapsed buildings and statements by national politicians or does it also highlight the fact that neighboring member states send rescue teams to help dig survivors out of the rubble and that the EU has allocated x million euros out of common funds to help with rebuilding work what do you show in the press coverage second illustration at a big sporting event let's take the olympic games at the olympics does the medals table just as now list each member state individually or do you also show a collective european union table in case you wonder i did the calculation if you take the 2016 summer olympics the runaway winners of the olympics were the EU 28 106 gold 110 silver 110 bronze 326 medals in all way ahead way ahead of the actual winners who were the usa who had 121 medals in all and by the way if you recalculate for the EU 27 and you take out the UK which did exceptionally well in Rio the EU is still comfortably ahead of the field you've come up with 255 medals now i'm sure you've never you've never done that calculation and you've never heard those figures because we never present them we just look at the individual member states let's draw this together what i have offered you today is a sketch obviously painted with very broad rustics it is a personal at times it is a passion of you of where we've come from where we are and where we need to get to and i'm not saying that my my vision if if you could dignify it with that word is necessarily the right one or the only one but i would close with the plea the european project really matters it is not unfortunately some of my other nationality fellow countrymen who are presently vying for domestic power do not understand this it is not about a bookkeeping calculation of what precisely do i pay in and what precisely do i get out i said something fairly passionate about this in the visigrad cases i suppose another way of putting it would be to say that the european project is about something bigger and rather more important and worthwhile than putting a message on the side of a bus saying we pay 350 million a week to brussels let's fund our nhs instead the european project is about peace security and prosperity for ourselves and for those who come after us in this beautiful and richly diverse continent in which we're privileged to live it is about how to transform that ideal that goal into practical daily reality and to do that europe needs our engagement europe needs us to pour our individual gifts and insights into the collective endeavour it needs us as european citizens to give meaning to that phrase that has come into our legal vernacular citizenship of the union and to make our contribution to the european demos to be committed not as greek city-state hoplites with shield and sword but to be committed as engaged and creative thinkers and doers for the common good that i suggest to you that is the challenge of the european project in the 21st century and that is the challenge that we must rise to thank you very much