Communicating Europe
As part of my personal commitment to breakdown the information gulf between ordinary citizens in Ireland and the institutions of the European Union I have drawn up and implemented a Communicating Europe Strategy.
The four key actions:
- The first of these actions is to engage and work with Regional, Local and Community based media in Ireland. It is essential that the media is reporting stories from the European Union in order to provide a continuous stream of information to the public. More often than not news from the institutions in Brussels has a direct bearing on the people in Ireland. Every single community in Ireland benefits from its membership of the European Union and it will only benefit even more if we are aware of events in Brussels on a regular basis.
I feel very strongly about the importance of having a vibrant local media sector in Ireland, that present high quality news articles that leads to debate and discussion.
Under this heading I ran the European Young Journalism Competition for 18-35 year olds. The competition encouraged journalists to submit articles either from audio or print media on a European Union topic. The quality of entrants and the level of participation meant the competition was a resounding success. There were six winners of the competition, three of whom where from Donegal, Kevin Kelly of the Inishowen Independent and Inishowen Community Radio, Marie McDonald from Inishowen Community Radio, and Amy Rose Harte from the Donegal News. The other winners came where Nicola Corless from the Clare Champion, Ruth Feeley from the Western People and Deirdre Flynn from the Athlone Voice.
I am also continuously working with local and regional radio stations and have sponsored live radio shows from the European Parliament in Brussels, those radio stations that have broadcast live from the parliament include, Northern Sound, Clare FM, Galway Bay FM, Midlands Radio and Ocean FM. - The second element of the strategy is to encourage active participation of young people in politics, European Politics in particular. As part of this element of the strategy I have been sponsoring groups of young people from all over the constituency to come to Brussels on a three day trip. The aim of the trip is to engage them with the European Parliament and other European Union Institutions. It helps them understand and comprehend the scale of the work that goes on in Brussels on a day to day basis. I also provide them with access to the Parliament chamber, and arrange meetings with members of the European Commission and other MEPs.
To date, we have sponsored over young people all of whom have gone back to Ireland with a greater enthusiasm for politics and the EU. - The third element of the communicating Europe strategy is allowing you to put your question to Europe. This initiative allows you to put a question directly to the European Commission or the European Council. I am the first and only MEP to offer this initiative out of the 736 MEPs in the European Parliament. The initiative allows you to send me an email with your question which will then be submitted using my privilege as a Member of the European Parliament to either the Commission of the Council, I will then send you the answer to your question once I have received it. If you have any questions that you wish to put to the European Commission or the European Council please email me at
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- The Fourth and Final element of the Strategy will see 200,000 households in the constituency receive a copy of my newsletter. I am also engaged with social networking sites like Facebook and twitter and have recently designed my website so that it is more inormative and easy to use.
