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This report was prepared by Jasmine Faudone and Elettra Bargellini (DCU Ph.D. students, School of Law & Government). Friday 20 January 2023 – Roundtable discussions The REBUILD Annual Conference was followed by a high-level roundtable moderated by Christy Ann Petit (Deputy Director of DCU Brexit Institute). The main speaker was Billy Kelleher, a Member of the…

This event report was prepared by Jasmine Faudone and Elettra Bargellini (DCU Ph.D. students, School of Law & Government). Introduction On the 19th and 20th January 2023, the DCU Brexit Institute held the REBUILD Annual Conference on NGEU: Furthering Economic Legal and Fiscal Integration in person, hosted by the European Parliament Liaison Office in Ireland.…

Edoardo Celeste (Dublin City University) The 4th of January 2023 has been definitively not a positive day for Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s multinational company owning both Facebook and Instagram. Not only did Facebook lose a bid to dismiss a US lawsuit promoted by a sculptor who accused the company of allowing counterfeit ads which violated the…

Gary Murphy (Dublin City University) The most minimalist reshuffle in the history of modern Irish politics has taken place and the two main government parties have pinned the hopes for the rest of their government on a team that does not inspire much love among the electorate but is widely seen as competent. While the…

Ian Cooper (DCU Brexit Institute) The British people now find themselves in the absurd position of realizing that they made a policy choice they no longer want but have no way to reverse it. The policy in question, of course, is Brexit. In the 2016 referendum 51.9% of the electorate voted for the UK to…

Annelieke Mooij (Tilburg University) The German Constitutional Court (BVerfG) decided on the 6th of December 2022 on what has been called the “Eurobonds-case”. The case concerned the method of generating funds for the Next Generation EU Fund (NGEU). The NGEU is established to support Member States’ economic recovery from the COVID19 pandemic. It will furthermore…

Jasmine Faudone (Dublin City University) On Thursday 1st December 2022 the DCU Brexit Institute and the Princeton University Center for Human Values and Law held an hybrid event on “Brexit from a Global Perspective: How the UK withdrawal from the EU affected Ireland, Northern Ireland, Europe and Transatlantic Relations”. The event was hosted at Princeton…

Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Queen Mary University of London) REFERENCE by the Lord Advocate of devolution issues under paragraph 34 of Schedule 6 to the Scotland Act 1998 On 23 November 2022, the UK Supreme Court gave judgement on the legal viability of a second Scottish independence referendum, in a reference made by the Lord Advocate (the…

Michael Keating (University of Aberdeen) The Supreme Court judgment on the legality of a Scottish independence referendum can be broken down into three elements. Two are unsurprising but the third is problematic. The first decision was to accept the case at all. The UK Government had argued that the issue was hypothetical and premature and…

Gunilla Herolf (Swedish Institute of International Affairs) The results of the Swedish parliamentary elections on 11 September 2022 were met with bewilderment and concern in many countries as well as among many in Sweden. The reason for this reaction was that the big winner (increasing its share of the vote from 17 to 20 percent)…

Ian Cooper (DCU Brexit Institute) Earlier this week a milestone was reached in post-Brexit EU-UK relations, the second meeting of the Parliamentary Partnership Assembly (PPA). The creation of the PPA was envisaged by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), the treaty that set the terms of the new EU-UK relationship following the UK withdrawal. The…

Pier Mario Lupinu (University of Luxembourg and Università degli Studi Roma Tre) In the framework of the REBUILD project, on the 3rd of November 2022, the DCU Brexit Institute held an online event on “Banking Union after Next Generation EU”. The event, chaired by Christy Ann Petit (Assistant Professor at the DCU and Deputy Director…

Anna Barbalho (Dublin City University) Lula da Silva won the second round of the Brazilian presidential elections last Sunday in the most significant contest since the country’s re-democratization. In the first round of voting, none of the presidential candidates received an outright majority, and Jair Bolsonaro and Lula advanced to the second round with 43.2%…

Feargal Cochrane (University of Kent) Despite all the shenanigans and psychodramas within the Conservative Party, it might be easy to forget that it is not just politics in Westminster that is in semi-permanent crisis. Devolved government in Northern Ireland has been that way for years. In fact its government has been in an induced coma…

Ian Cooper and Christy Ann Petit Merrion Square in central Dublin is well known as one of the poshest addresses in all of Ireland. Visitors to the north side of the square are greeted by a giant banner hanging over number 66, the address of the French Embassy. It reads, “France, your closest EU neighbour.”…

Andrew Duff Brexit has not worked, even for its adherents. The next British government must find a way back to Europe. Establishing a customs union with the EU is a first step; signing on to core single market disciplines the second. Sectoral agreements will be negotiated for other policies. The EU must adapt itself to…

Janez Kren and Martina Lawless (Economic and Social Research Institute, Ireland) The UK exited the EU Single Market and Customs Union on January 1, 2021, arguably the largest incidence of trade disintegration in over fifty years. Between the referendum and exit date, a wide literature on the potential impacts of Brexit emerged covering many potential…

Federico Fabbrini (Professor of Law, Dublin City University; Founding Director, Brexit Institute; Visiting Professor, Princeton University) It has been repeatedly emphasized how Brexit has benefited Dublin, with the Irish capital attracting an ever greater number of talents in tech, finance and education — and becoming an ever more international and multicultural city. Yet, if Dublin…

Lucrezia Rossi (DCU Brexit Institute) The origin of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) dates back to 1996, when China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan signed an international agreement known as Group of Shanghai (or Shanghai Five), whose major purpose was to guarantee security in Central Asia. As a matter of fact, to overcome the border tensions…

Liv Sunnercrantz  (University of Stavanger) The results of the 2022 Swedish elections looked like a “a seismic shift” to international onlookers. But the increased electoral support for the nationalist far right party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), came as no surprise to most Swedes. Only three parties managed to increase their electoral support in September: The…