Jamie Smyth, Brussels Correspondent, Irish Times and Sean Whelan, European Correspondent RTE: Ireland’s influence within the EU and globally, a view from Brussels

Senator Déirdre de Búrca:   I welcome both speakers to the sub-committee and thank them for their insights into how the Irish “No” vote in the Lisbon treaty referendum is affecting our standing and influence within the European Union. While our terms of reference are broad, the sub-committee’s purpose is to look at how we might respond as a country to that rejection in order to try to protect Ireland’s interests within the Union.

Part of our remit is trying to understand the implications for Ireland, as well as how it was that the Irish people chose to reject the Lisbon treaty. The role of the media is important in considering that question. Our two guests are familiar faces and names in covering European issues. It seems, however, that there is poor coverage of such issues in the Irish media. When the sub-committee was first established, I talked to one or two members of the Irish media who laughed and said, “It will be very difficult to cover anything your sub-committee is doing because of the yawn factor.” People are not interested. As soon as the European Union is mentioned, they switch off because it is seen as highly technical, complex and hard to relate to. How difficult is it for members of the media based in Brussels to make European stories interesting? Is part of the difficulty the fact that European politics are sterile because of the lack of a human dimension? As regards national politics, the population at large knows its politicians and enjoys seeing the relationships between different politicians and parties. It seems the human dimension of European politics is lacking. If asked to name key politicians or officials in the European institutions, most people would not know who they are. They cannot relate to or identify politicians or officials at European level. Is that a difficulty and how might it be addressed through the media?

 Are European issues covered in the basic training journalists receive? Is it a fact that journalists are as unfamiliar and uncomfortable with European issues and the whole European political system as ordinary members of the public and that is why they avoid covering them to the extent that it appears they should?

My last question is about jargon. The Secretary General of the European Commission spoke here yesterday about the new initiative on communications being launched by Commissioner Margot Wallström. The key to that initiative is simplification of much of the jargon used to describe what is happening at European level. How difficult is this? Is it a challenge in our guests’ own work? How do they think politicians and the media might get around it?

Mr. Jamie Smyth:  Yes, covering European issues can be difficult. I was not here during the referendum campaign. As I was reporting from Brussels, I do not know the ins and outs or the detail of the referendum campaign because I was not part of it in that respect. From my experience of working in Brussels, it is a complicated place. There are 27 member states which have come together to form a union. That is one of the reasons the Lisbon treaty is a complicated document; it is a real compromise between 27 member states. In a certain way, there is not full trust between them. One has to write every single element in the treaties. Unfortunately, that is a fact of Brussels life. Brussels has to do more, particularly on jargon, for example, as the Senator mentioned. There are a lot of strange words which I came across when I first went there. I felt I was in a foreign place because it takes a long time to get to know them. The EU institutions and the politicians and civil servants who work in Ireland will have to get to grips with that and boil down such euro-jargon to terms that normal people on the street can understand. There is work to be done in Brussels in this area. I noticed from the Millward Brown survey that some of the literature handed out by the Referendum Commission used too much terminology and may have been placed at a level that was too high for ordinary people to understand. That needs to change.

How do I cover Brussels? Journalists should try to bring the story to the people rather than focusing just on the institutional aspect, such as the votes in Parliament. For example, let us imagine there is legislation on energy security going through. The way to do it is to go to a nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic, say, and write an interesting story. That is one thing we try to do at The Irish Times. I have travelled throughout Europe quite a lot. That is a good way to do it. We covered the Lisbon treaty campaign in Europe to a considerable extent. I had to write a 10,000-word series on the Lisbon treaty, consisting of ten articles, which was quite a challenge. From the point of view of my newspaper, the problem was not lack of effort or lack of coverage. However, politicians sometimes put too much emphasis on how much influence the media has. I am not sure that people vote in referendums or elections campaigns based only on the articles we write. If there is a second referendum, for example, it will be important for politicians to engage with people on the doorsteps. It is such personal engagement that might change people’s opinions.

Mr. Seán Whelan:  My firm belief is that media follow politics, although I know some members may take the contrary view. Whatever goes on in politics will be picked up and reflected by the media. The most important place for disseminating messages in Ireland is the Dáil bar, followed closely by the Law Library and watering holes around that area. These two gossip factories are the places in which the media feed on the information presented to them. If politicians are not talking about Europe then the media are not talking about Europe. They will take their cue from those such as the members of this committee – the elected representatives. If there was more talk about Europe in the Dáil bar that would be reflected in the media coverage. It can only be viewed in the context in which it is taking place. The surge of coverage of the Lisbon treaty in the last three or four weeks before the vote was fine, as we could all justify the number of articles we published, but the context in which that coverage appeared was rather an arid wasteland of lack of context. Plonking down treaties in front of people and giving them huge articles and long-winded, worthy pieces on the radio about the ins and outs of the treaty is meaningless, frankly, if they do not have the context, and will not work.

How do we develop the context? How do we get to the point at which Members of the Houses and journalists in these precincts are gossiping about bits of European legislation in the Dáil bar? Members have seen through their own work the activities of other committee systems in Europe – particularly the Danish committee system, but also, to a certain extent, the British and German systems. Our experience in Brussels is that the best-informed journalists in terms of what is going on are the Danes, on a purely technical basis. They have the background and the information because their own parliamentary committee has produced the information in an authoritative and widely accepted way, as members heard from the testimony of the Danish Members of Parliament. We are starting to see this also with the Germans who, because of the reporting system now established in the Bundestag, have a good overview of what is going on, particularly in terms of reporting on who said what at the Council.

That is particularly interesting because one does not always get that from national delegations at the time. However, the Germans take it seriously. Last week at the summit I noted that the first thing Ms Angela Merkel did each morning was that she went into the Bundestag to brief the parliament before flying to Brussels, going to the EPP pre-meeting and attending the actual summit. The information was being diffused. That is not how we do things in Ireland. Until there is a systematic approach to processing information, digesting it internally within the political system and disseminating it through the normal political communication channels the context will not be created. We can write all the articles we like but it will not get through to people. It is a long-term, slow-burn and very deep process. Much of the information will be disseminated through non-media communication, by politicians dealing with their own constituents and lobbying, industrial and civil society organisations and the constant political dialogue that continues for years. As the sub-committee has heard, the Danes have been doing this since 1973. Therefore, we are coming late into the game. That is the context in which media are operating here. 

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Joint Committee on European Affairs by Deirdre