What you might need to know

This video includes AI-generated content produced under human supervision. Script by Dr Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan.

In this lesson, we get the children to think about what it means to be part of a club. They are usually part of clubs themselves so they have lots to say about the good and the bad things about being in a club. We draw parallels with Ireland belonging to the EU club.

The club was created to bring peace to Europe. It managed to do this so it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 for its success in preserving peace for over 60 years. It’s as if the EU had received a gold medal for keeping peace in Europe.

The EU is a really big club of 27 countries. It goes from Ireland on the edge of the EU in the West to Cyprus on the opposite edge to the East. The smallest population and country is Malta, located under the country shaped like a boot (Italy). The largest population is in Germany. The EU is a united and very diverse club.

To engage the children in understanding what a Union is as opposed to an aggregation of individual countries, we get them to make a smoothie. Each fruit represents a country. They’re all delicious by themselves but when they come together, they make something new, the EU!

You can think that a smoothie is the perfect representation for an EU crushing national identities and sovereignty. But actually, it really highlights how interwoven countries in the club are. The EU can not be compared to a fruit salad as Brexit has shown. Otherwise, if the UK was grapes for example, it would be very easy to pick the grapes out and we know that Brexit wasn’t easy.

The EU is a smoothie where you can still see individual countries (the smoothie is blue because of the blueberries, it’s liquid because of the milk, the banana tastes very strongly) but to take a fruit out, you will need some chemistry process of disaggregation, like Brexit has showed! This highlights the DNA of the EU: shared sovereignty.

Enjoy the smoothie!