THE GOOD INFORMATION Project at The Journal invites you to join us at lunchtime this Thursday for an in-depth conversation on how Ireland’s relationship has evolved with the EU over the past five decades.

Ireland voted emphatically in a referendum in May 1972 to join the then European Economic Community (EEC). We officially took our place on 1 January 1973. But how different were the workings of the European Parliament then to what our MEPs experience now? Has the European project always been to our advantage? What do we hope for going forward?

Journal Media Managing Editor Susan Daly will speak to two people whose careers have bookended Ireland’s time in the EU thus far.

The first is Fionnuala Richardson who worked for the Socialist grouping in Luxembourg f0r 13 years from 1974 and has many insights on what made the EEC go round, particularly with some member states who had been on opposite sides of a world war not three decades earlier. 

Joining Fionnuala and Susan will be Barry Colfer, Director of Research at the International Institute of European Affairs (IIEA), a highly-decorated academic in all things European and who has worked at both the Houses of the Oireachtas here and the European Parliament.

Join them for this free and final Open Newsroom of our Good Information Project from 1-2pm this Thursday, 23 June 2022. REGISTER HERE>

This work is also co-funded by Journal Media and a grant programme from the European Parliament. Any opinions or conclusions expressed in this work are the author’s own. The European Parliament has no involvement in nor responsibility for the editorial content published by the project. For more information, see here.