Ireland needs to regain its passion for the EU

From acorns come oaks. But if you don’t go planting, there will be no trees. The Irish Times reported last week on an internal Department of Foreign Affairs document which warned that Ireland is at risk of becoming “significantly underrepresented at all levels” of the EU Commission.

It is happening, the report said, because not enough young Irish people are choosing to join the Commission and make their careers there. The newspaper reported that "for every four Irish people retiring from high-ranking commission posts, only one passed the EU executive’s competitive recruitment process".

That is quite the change, and not a good one. When I was young, it was fairly common for bright young Irish people – many of them from the west – to think about joining the EU Commission for their career. Many graduates would head over to what is called a ‘stage’, a six-month placement within one of the Commission departments. Many came home after and went on to other work – but retained the benefit of having a good sense of how things worked in Brussels and of having made some connections. Many also stayed and made great careers there.

It wasn’t so long ago that Irish officials like David O’Sullivan and Catherine Day rose to the very top, each becoming Secretary General of the EU Commission. Amazingly those two succeeded each other, meaning that for 15 years – from 2000 to 2015 – an Irish person held the most influential civil service post in the whole Commission. That reflected their individual ability, but it also reflected that the EU of that time had loads of Irish people in senior positions. Now those people are retiring, and the new generation is not coming behind them in sufficient numbers.

Why does that matter? For a lot of reasons. The Commission is the executive of the EU. It doesn’t make the laws – the Ministers of the member states and the European Parliament do that – but the Commission implements and enforces EU law. It is a very powerful body. Having Irish people working in its senior corridors is extremely helpful to Irish interests. An Irish audience doesn’t need explaining why that is so. If you know someone from home, it always makes things easier, whatever it is you are doing.

But it also matters in a wider sense. Our prosperity and our economic and social progress for the last 50 years has been built through our relationship with the EU. We have an enormous vested interest in the EU succeeding and – in these challenging times – surviving. We saw in dramatic terms how important it was to us during Brexit. Indeed the reason there was no border on the island of Ireland before Brexit was because of the EU.

The EU has been the most successful means yet devised to manage competition between nation states in Europe. It was not founded as Donald Trump thinks to thwart American interests, but to ensure that war could never happen again between its member states. The key to doing that was to intertwine the economies of Germany and France. The idea was that by doing this you made war between them not only unthinkable but impossible. How to prevent war was the impulse that got the whole enterprise of European integration going.

The institutional EU that emerged out of that dynamic also provided Ireland with a marvellous way and opportunity to move beyond our dependence on Britain. It is naïve to think that we got independence from Britain in 1922. After that date, we exported cattle and people to them and they controlled our currency. Our independence was nominal, the green paint over the crown on the post boxes. We were backward and we were poor, and we had few options.

The EEC and then the EU was the means for Ireland to break out of the box it was contained in. It allowed us to find new markets, and to increase investment and thus the size of our economy, which gave us more individual opportunity as well as more political leverage in the world. We have succeeded brilliantly in utilising that, balancing out our relationship with Britain, as seen most spectacularly in how our interests were defended during Brexit.

That is why the EU matters to us. And so it is worrisome that we don’t have more young Irish recruits wanting to make their careers there, to make their contribution there.

Why is it happening? Some say it is that our language skills have declined – for understandably you need two languages to work in the Commission. Some say that young Irish people have better opportunities these days and so they are making their way in other areas.

Maybe it’s a bit of both, but my instinct tells me that there is more to it than that. My instinct tells me that the fire that existed in my generation’s belly about what the EU meant for our country has faded. My instinct also tells me that for all the lip service that is given to how wonderfully international Ireland has become, we are often very insular, not appreciating the connections between what is happening on the ground here and our situation in the world. It also reflects a sense that it is somehow wrong for us to articulate our own material interests in the world, perhaps because of some sense that doing so would somehow betray the colonised people we once were.

Whatever is behind it, we don’t think in a serious enough way about how we make our way in the world. Our debates don’t focus – in any way worth talking about – on the EU or the political developments within it. And so we talk all the time about international issues over which we have virtually no leverage, and too little about things that affect us mightily and where we could contribute. We then too often focus on things that are incredibly small fry while missing the big picture for us.

That can be in defence, where we talk about the apparently vast importance of the ‘triple lock’, while Germany plans to massively increase the size of its army, and the French talk of extending their nuclear umbrella. We talk about blocking free trade deals with South America, and do so at the very time that the biggest threat to our prosperity is attacks on tariff free trade. Such things suggest we haven’t quite got the memo yet.

The free ride on security and on economic opportunity that we have had for decades is ending. A new world is being created in which the small and the weak will be picked off by the strong. The Taoiseach was 100 per cent right to play it like he did in the Oval Office, and he did a brilliant job to get out of there without trouble. But do you think the President of the EU Commission needs to play it that way in Washington? They don’t. Why? Because the EU is stronger than Ireland: and so together we are stronger. In this new world being born, we have to recognise that we are too small to swim along solo in an ocean of sharks.

It is time therefore for those who believe in the European ideal to start explaining again why it matters. And it is also why we need our best young people to step up and serve.