IN COMPARISON to the citizens of other member-states, the Irish are moderately well-informed about the European Union. When measured on various scales of knowledge of EU institutions and processes, they come out just above the EU average.

This is not a particular compliment to the Irish, since the general level of knowledge of Europe is not very impressive. For example, in 1993, just one year before the fourth round of European Parliament elections, 59 per cent of the European public did not know that the European Parliament was directly elected.

The Irish were marginally better informed, with only (!) 52 per cent blissfully ignorant of that fact (Eurobarometer No.39, spring, 1993).

This rather unpromising picture of Irish understanding of Europe becomes a black hole of ignorance when we look at how much people know about what the current Inter-Governmental Conference is all about. Faced with two correct and two incorrect descriptions of the topics the Inter-Governmental Conference is dealing with, and asked to identify what is being discussed and what is not, the vast majority of the Irish public gets it woefully wrong.

A mere 7 per cent give the correct answer (no) on whether the IGC is discussing "a date for monetary union". Fifty-three per cent admit they simply do not know and 43 per cent think that the IGC is dealing with this question (the timetable for monetary union was in fact decided and laid down in the Maastricht Treaty).

One could perhaps argue that this was too tricky a question and that some confusion is to be expected. Maybe the problem is that discussions of monetary union are getting so much coverage that the ordinary member of the public assumes that, if there is an IGC, it must be talking about this hot issue.

The same argument can hardly be applied to the next wrong topic: "A trade deal with the US". The most minimal level of knowledge about the IGC and about the current constitutional debate in Europe should lead the citizen to rule this out as a topic of IGC discussion. In fact, only 12 per cent do so, leaving 22 per cent giving the wrong answer and a massive two-thirds majority explicitly pleading ignorance.

The defender of the myth of the informed Irish citizen might come back and say that these questions cause confusion by putting forward topics that are not on the agenda. The problem with this argument is that the picture is only marginally better when we turn to the public's knowledge of the two principal items being dealt with by the IGC: institutional reform and revamping the Maastricht provisions on a common foreign and security policy.

Twenty-four per cent get it right on institutional reform and 29 per cent do so on the common foreign and security policy question. The final decisions taken by the IGC on these two issues are highly likely to confront the Irish public with difficult choices. It is true that there has been a European debate going on about these issues for over three years now; the problem is that the debate is not an intense and widespread public debate.

The evidence in this poll suggests that, whatever the elites may think, these issues are still going to spring unseen on an unsuspecting Irish public.

This yawning elite-mass gap is partially reflected within public opinion itself. On all of the questions on the topics of the IGC there is a difference of between 10 and 20 percentage points in the rate of don't knows between middle class and working class, between men and women and between the employed and the unemployed.

There are also generational differences: explicit confessions of ignorance are considerably more prevalent among the elderly (65+) and the young (under 35) as compared with the middle-aged.

The monetary union discussion question throws up a revealing quirk: the middle class and men are less likely to acknowledge that they don't know anything about whether the IGC is discussing this matter; but they are also more likely to get it wrong. Fifty-two per cent of middle class respondents think the IGC is talking about a date for monetary union compared to 39 per cent of working class respondents; 51 per cent of men have this same (wrong) view, compared to 35 per cent of women.

It may be that middle class men are a little bit better informed about, and have some interest in, the topic and feel that the IGC ought to be talking about a date for monetary union. Or it may be that it is not either the socially desirable or macho thing to admit ignorance of these matters, with the result that these groups are more inclined to make a guess and, in a significant number of cases, the guesses are wrong.

Does all this low level of knowledge and understanding matter? It certainly matters for the quality of Irish democracy. But it also matters in a practical political sense, that is in terms of the views people take on the issues. A strong relationship between knowing about Europe and supporting European integration has been demonstrated by previous Eurobarometer research.

Some evidence of this relationship is also found in the present poll, which carried just one question on people's preferences on European integration. The question reminded the respondent that the EU is committed to enlargement to include a number of countries in central and eastern Europe and then asked: "Are you in favour or not in favour of this enlargement of the European Union?"

Those who responded positively were also asked a supplementary question: "If this enlargement meant that Ireland would get less in EU funds, would you then be in favour or not in favour?" If the responses to both questions, which are reported separately in the accompanying charts, are combined, the outcome is as follows: 28 per cent are in favour of enlargement even if it involves a reduction in EU funding for Ireland; a further 18 per cent are in favour only if there is no reduction in funding; 33 per cent are against the whole idea and 21 per cent don't know.

Given that enlargement seems inconceivable without a reduction in EU funding to existing less developed regions in the Union, what matters is support for enlargement even in the circumstances of lower funding. Such support is related to understanding what the EU is all about: it rises to 39 per cent among those who know that the IGC is talking about the common foreign and security policy but falls to 23 per cent among those who don't know this rather basic fact.

Knowledge matters and the level of knowledge of IGC issues is remarkably low in Ireland. Given that the Irish have an average level of knowledge of the EU in general, it may be that knowledge of the IGC is equally low throughout much of the Union.

Whatever the Dublin summit decides about the IGC and its progress report, it should make the decision with a full awareness of the vast gap between it and the European public on these issues.