Brexit day.

Today is Brexit day. Today the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is leaving the European Union. I am sad to see it go. The UK joined the European Economic Community, the EEC as it was then, on 1st January 1973, the same day as the Republic of Ireland joined. I have been thinking of how I encountered the UK as part of the European project through my involvement as a teenager in EYP, the European Youth Parliament. This international organisation was modelled, as the name suggests, on the European Parliament. When I was involved with it in the 1990s, most European countries sent a team of young people to participate in the parliamentary sessions of the EYP which were held in a different European city twice a year. I had wonderful experiences at these sessions, as did most other attendees - we met people from all over Europe, lifelong friendships were made, politics were wildly debated, beers drunk, dances and romances had.

At these sessions, one member of each national team joined a committee made up of representatives from every country, and the committee met, discussed and drew up a resolution on whichever pressing topic of the day it was concerned with, ranging across economics, health, environment, agriculture, transport, education, human rights and every other topic of concern to Europe. Then the resolutions were debated and fought for in the general assembly with all the participants of that session present, usually a couple of hundred people. The sessions began with two days of team-building exercises where you got to know, trust and cooperate with the other members of your committee. After the session finished, the resolutions were sent to the relevant committees of the European Parliament.

This might sound like dry debating practice but instead it was passionate, intelligent, multi-cultural engagement with what it meant to be a citizen, and a citizen of Europe. And a hell of a party, with over a hundred teenagers away from home for a week in a European city, working all day and partying all night, cooperating in committee groups and speaking in front of the general assembly, swapping cultural foibles, learning about each other and themselves. I've remained friends for 25 years with someone I met at a session, and am the godmother to the child of another EYP friend of even earlier vintage. I know many others who are still friends decades later with the people from a myriad of European countries who they spent an intense week with in a distant European location.

And what does this have to do with the UK leaving the EU? Well, today on Brexit day I am remembering the UK teams at the EYP sessions I attended. The first one I attended was in Berlin. Incredibly we held our general assembly in the Reichstag, in the parliamentary chamber, which was given over to us for two days, just before it closed to be renovated to more properly accommodate the parliament of the recently united Germany. At this session I was a member of the Irish team. Competitions were held among schools in most European countries to choose a team to represent their country at the EYP sessions. In some countries, like Ireland, individuals from many schools competed at a day long mini-session where they created and debated resolutions. Then individuals were chosen to be on the team, based on their individual performance, so the Irish team was made up mainly of strangers who came from different schools around the country. In contrast, the UK selection process pitted teams from various schools against each other, and a team from one school was then chosen to represent the UK at that EYP session. At the Berlin session, a Scottish school team was representing the UK. In Berlin, there was a lot of bonding between the Scottish and Irish participants, as Celtic brothers and sisters. Every country showed off their culture, in organised performances and informally, showcasing their nation's music, food, clothes and more. On one memorable evening the Scots showed off their kilts (and what was, or wasn't, under them). Every country was proud of its heritage and culture, and every country was also proud of its European heritage and culture. We could all be proud, and also self-mocking and open and funny and critical. There was no doubt that people were Finnish, or German, or Italian, or French, or Austrian, or Belgian, or Czech or anything else, but we were all simultaneously European. Thinking back on it now, the UK team was just like everyone else in this way. They were British, and they were Scottish, and they were European. None of those identities or cultures or ways of being were incompatible. The multiplicity enriched them, and enriched the collective of European difference that we all embodied and enjoyed.

At this session I was in the economics committee which was drawing up a resolution about European monetary union. In the mid 1990s such an economic union had not yet been agreed, let alone implemented, and debate was raging about every aspect of what such a union might entail, including what the money would look like. This issue of what pictures would go on the cash that might eventually get issued across Europe was a hot topic - people are very attached to their national currency and the people and places emblazoned on it. I think the name ECU, European Currency Unit, was still being floated, and there was a long way to go to reach the Euro and the EU monetary union we now have. In the actual European Parliament committee, in the media and in other places at the time, no-one had been able to find a solution for a design of the currency notes and coins that would satisfy the many countries that would be part of it. The entire topic was volatile. In our EYP committee, I remember the Finnish delegate storming out of the committee room having been rejected in his impassioned plea for Finland to be allowed to join the economic union immediately they joined the EU, which was due to happen the following year. And this was just our discussion of a mock resolution for a youth 'parliament', not the actual committee in Strasbourg or Brussels making policy. This was a time before enlargement to the current 28 members, when Finland, Sweden and Austria were not yet members, let alone the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004 and others subsequently. But as young people we felt strongly, about our European identity, our relationship to the EU, and our desire to participate in European political and economic activity. Ultimately, our committee came up with the inspired idea of minting the European currency with one side of the note or coin having a national symbol on it, unique to each country, and the other side having a design that was the same across Europe. As the only native English speakers on the committee, myself representing Ireland and the Scottish boy representing the UK wrote this into the final resolution text using linguistic flourishes such as 'pan-European design' and 'idiosyncratic national motif'. Later, this was exactly how the Euro currency was designed. Where could the deadlocked policymakers have gotten that idea? Certainly not from the EYP resolutions that were sent to the European Parliament committees after our session, created and debated by young people from all over Europe, our shared vision articulated by British and Irish English-speakers.

At the second EYP session I attended, I'd returned as a session journalist, covering the activities of the committees and assembly for the daily newspaper that we issued to all participants. This session was in Denmark. There was a new Irish team of individuals from schools around Ireland. For the first time, a school from Northern Ireland had been selected to represent the UK. Again the Irish and UK participants bonded particularly strongly, hailing from the same island. This time there was some debate within the UK team about exactly what it meant to be 'British'. This reflected the tensions in the region at the time, pre-dating the Good Friday Agreement, and the fact that the school was a Catholic one from a border town. Some of the UK team crossed out UK on their badges and put Northern Ireland; others made a point of saying that they were British and that a Northern Irish school was proud to be there representing the UK. But all felt themselves to be unquestionably European. Whether they identified more strongly with a Northern Irish, Irish or British identity, they were all European citizens and happy to be so.

So today half an hour before the UK leaves the EU, I am remembering those intense, powerful and wonderful experiences as a teenager, as a person from Ireland meeting people from Scotland and Northern Ireland who were part of the UK and part of Europe, debating what that national identity meant but sure of their presence as Europeans, among dozens of other European countries. I am remembering the experiences of friendship, debate and cooperation with people from the United Kingdom who were all European, and more than that all committed to the project of the European Union. Which is an incredible, necessarily flawed but brave and peaceful project to unite Europe in so many ways, while celebrating and protecting its differences. And I am sad that tonight that changes. The United Kingdom, Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, whatever forms these entities have now or may take in the future, will always be part of Europe. But they will not be part of the European Union, at least for a while. I wish during these last three years and more as Brexit unfolded, indeed during these last 47 years of the UK's membership of the EU, that the value, benefits, complexity and power of being part of that united Europe could have been better understood and celebrated. This union is something immensely valuable, for the UK and the EU. We go on to a different future now, apart. I hope in that future we can still find ways to be European, together.