Bobby McDonagh

And yet Irish identity is much more complex.

Or I could give so many examples.

Boris Johnson coming up to the referendum on Brexit.

frightened people about the risk of, completely imaginary risk of numbers of Turkish people coming to the UK.

His grandfather was Ali Kemal, a Turkish journalist.

So the politics of identity is very simple, but the reality of it is very complex.

And the European Union understands that.

And it was established because of the complexity of identity.

Not because the member states of the European Union were in any way perfect, not at all, but because of the tragedies of the last century in Europe, they understood better than anyone that identity is complex.

And so the European Union was set up not because Europeans are perfect, but precisely because they're imperfect.

And they need procedures that allow them to work cooperatively together more than they have ever done in history and more than any other group of countries in the world does today.

Not at all.

I see it absolutely increasing.

I mean, Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, said recently that we don't have to submit to a more transactional, insular and brutal world.

And he said that the international order will be rebuilt out of Europe.

A Canadian said that sometimes people outside Europe have a better understanding of a potential than we have ourselves.

So the raison d'etre of Europe is much greater internationally.

than it even was before.

It is under existential threat in many ways, including from Russian aggression on the continent of Europe.

So it's all the more vital that we work together with all our imperfections, both in the interests of the citizens of each country, in the interests of citizens of Europe as a whole, and of the wider world.