Jillian van Turnhout
After the breakfast meeting I had a long chat with a consultant who is working with our Communication Group to devise an updated communication strategy for the Committee and then, a little bit later, I spoke to a group of Irish visitors from the Philanthropy Ireland Affinity Group, visiting the EU and the Committee under the aegis of one of our most active and respected members, Jillian Van Turnhout. My talk was followed by a discussion that I enjoyed very much. The guests expressed healthy scepticism about some of the trends I had described and I was reminded of something Peter Mandelson once said, that Euroscepticism is a misnomer. There is nothing wrong with scepticism, he argued, which just means helthy questioning of things, or an absence of unquestioning acceptance – it is cynicism, with its purely negative and destructive intention, that should be criticised.
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