Young Euro-sloganeers battle

Fifteen Irish schools submitted entries for the Motto for Europe competition, which was run over the past year in all EU member states by major newspapers in each state, including, in Ireland, The Irish Times. The European Media Jury recently met at the War Memorial Centre in Caen in France to select the final entries which go forward to the final EU jury this month.

The winning entry will be announced in Brussels on Thursday, May 4th. In all, 20,000 entries came from classes all over the EU.

The competition organisers - a French newspaper, a French telephone company and a Normandy war museum - decided to be very scientific about the selection process, employing lexical analysis to classify, scan and "bring the main trends (in the slogans) to the fore". Guided by the results of this survey which broke the mottoes into categories and analysed the frequency of words used, a European panel of journalists was invited to act as jurists and vote on the entries. They narrowed the choice down to seven.

According to Patrick Sandoz, a lexical analyst with the company Sofres-Mediascore, which produced a sociological study of the entries, "the dominant intellectual feature of the entries was a common wish to live together". This was combined, he said, with a common wish for "mutual respect, solidarity and taking account of the diversity of the citizens of the fifteen countries. "It is quite remarkable," he says, "that, whilst there has been no conflict between the members of the European Union for over 50 years, the term peace is one of the top three words used by young people.

"Neither the young adults who participated in this competition, nor their parents have experienced the second World War," he points out. The importance of the word peace "bears witness to the primacy of respecting human life in their eyes", he says. "Europe's mission is to be a humanist model and space in the eyes of the world where citizens, going beyond their diversity, maintain contacts creating social and cultural links. The low number of references to purely economic notions should be noted."

The final selection process will involve a panel of 15 EU representatives this Thursday in Brussels, which will pick the winning motto for Europe from the short-listed seven. Senator Mary Henry, will represent Ireland at the judging table.

About 70 translators were involved in the work of translating all the mottoes for the intermediary selection stages. "It's not the sort of work that we normally do . . . we did have some difficulties in the translations," Emma Wagner, head of the translation team in Brussels explains. "The very idea of translation in the EU is to give every one a voice. We had particular problems when there was a play on words."

According to Bart Verkade, news editor of the Rotterdams Dagblad newspaper in the Netherlands, "Our goal in this operation was to learn from school children what makes sense in Europe. And does the European Union make sense? The schools that did find time to join the competition were, under the circumstances, really the best and most motivated you can find. Whatever happens now, we already found our reward in the motivation of these children."