I should like to join in voicing concern about the fact that the Joint Committee on European Community Secondary Legislation has not yet come together. I appreciate that the Leader and the Deputy Leader of the House have been endeavouring to unravel the complex threads of why this Joint Committee have not met. When I ascertained as a member of the committee that one of the difficulties was the fact that MEPs had been initially put forward as full members of the committee, I brought it up at a meeting of the Labour Parliamentary Party and other members of the parliamentary party were nominated to replace the MEPs.
I agree with Senator Lanigan that this is not a real issue or a real problem. We have immensely important work to do, some of it he has put on the record of the House. We have also the whole problem of the super-levy. This joint committee should have been meeting urgently and publicly for the last number of weeks in a structured way looking at the whole problem of the milk super-levy and the future budgeting of the Community. We are better equipped than any other component of the two Houses of the Oireachtas to do this. It is hard for any individual Deputy or, indeed, Senator to have the back-up material and briefing to understand and bring home as parliamentarians to the Irish Ministers who will be negotiating at European level the urgency and importance of this problem.
It is vital that this committee meet as a matter of urgency. We are also about to be very embarrassed next week. It should be mentioned for the record that Members of the European Parliament who are members of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee of that parliament are coming to Ireland and want to meet Members of the Irish Joint Committee on European Community Secondary Legislation. Our committee has not yet met and the visiting group cannot meet an official deputation from that committee. In the absence of that the clerk to the joint committee — we have a staff — has been writing to the Whips to see whether unofficially members of that committee could meet in an informal delegation with the members of the European Parliament Economic and Monetary Committee. We are shown up as not being very serious as a parliament if at this stage we cannot bring our Joint Committee on European Community Secondary Legislation together given the urgency of the problems.
It is not a problem that Members of this House can be faulted for. We are doing all we can. However, there is a gap in the procedure for establishing committees in that it is so difficult to get them to actually meet and start their work at the beginning of a parliamentary term. That is something we or the Committee on Procedure and Privileges could look at. There is nobody we can address ourselves to. All we can do is what we are doing, raise the matter on the Order of Business and ask the Leader of the House, who has been doing his best, to get things moving. Other than that, I cannot see what we can do.
