The Royal Academy of Sciences

I have already admitted that I lived for too long at a still too impressionable age in a country that left on me its imprints for life.

When I came back, the cultural shocks succeeded at an impressive rate. Let me recall one of them. I had left Portugal in 1978 as an Assistente of Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto (FEP), to get my Master and Ph.D. degrees in Economics with a scholarship from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

I stayed in Canada longer than expected as I was offered a position as Professor at the University of Ottawa. When I returned in 1986, I came back to occuppy my position at FEP, now as Professor Auxiliar. There was no automatic equivalence of university degrees at the time. So, a jury was appointed by the Rector of the University of Porto to grant me recognition of my Canadian doctorate. I was approved.

At the same time, a colleague of mine, who is now a politician and a former minister, was coming back from Britain with her Ph. D. in Management Science. The supervisor of her Ph.D. dissertation was a well known academic in the field and a member of the The Royal Academy of Sciences. The Rector of the University of Porto appointed a jury to recognize her doctorate. Soon, the members of the jury were getting personal at each other and she turned out to be the victim. She was failed.

She wrote to her supervisor in Britain who, in turn, complained to the British Royal Academy of Sciences. The Academy wrote a letter to the Rector of the University of Porto inquiring how a Ph. D. thesis, supervised by one of its distinguished members, could have been failed at the University of Porto.

The answer of the Rector was to appoint a friendly jury who rapidly approved her.

Portuguese people when faced with a stern, credible threat very often behave like cowards, was my shocking conclusion at the time. I still believe this today, as other experiences in my life only served to confirm this view, the only difference being that I would now substitute Catholic for merely Portuguese.

Thus, if I had the power, I know very well how I would deal with the Irish people after their No vote of yesterday to the Lisbon Treaty. I would tell them in no ambiguous terms: "Either you ratify the Treaty within six months or you are out of the EU by the end of the year". I am quite confident they would ratify the Treaty.