23 Jan 2014, 13:21
The Oireachtas Joint Committee on EU Affairs was this morning told that National Parliaments have an indispensable role to play in bridging the gap between the European Institutions and the European citizens.
22 January 2014
Secretary General of the European Commission Catherine Day was before the Committee to discuss the role of national parliaments in greater economic coordination across the European Union.
Committee Chairman Dominic Hannigan TD says: “Some commentators in Ireland have proclaimed that with the departure of the Troika we have regained full economic control of our country. This is not so. The new reality is that measures introduced to deal with the European crisis – known in eurospeak as the “Six Pack” and the “Two Pack” - mean a pooling of economic sovereignty. EU countries, and particularly euro area countries, are no longer able to formulate and conduct their economic policy in complete isolation from other EU countries.
“The most senior official in the European Commission, Dublin-born Catherine Day, this morning briefed our Committee on the proactive role that national parliaments have to play in this process. Responding to the argument that our parliamentary system was currently ill-equipped to scrutinise EU legislation, Ms Day said that National Parliaments across the European Union were swamped with proposals from Brussels, and needed to figure out how best to prioritise the proposals with most impact with citizens on the ground.
\"We questioned Ms Day on the degree of resistance within Member States to direction from the European Commission in these new arrangements. Ms Day responded that recent Commission interventions - in Belgium and Luxembourg regarding wage competitiveness and in Germany on their trade surplus – had initially received hostile criticism. However, she said that these interventions were later seen as stimulating important national debates which ultimately would lead to healthier economic policies being pursued.
“Committee Members raised the practice in the past of larger Member States ignoring EU and Eurozone guidelines. Ms Day emphatically argued that all Member States – big and small – had to abide by the same rules, and that the Commission was not doing its job properly if it wasn’t applying the rules equally.
“The Committee shares Ms Day’s concern over the risk that Ireland may be underrepresented in the workforce of the European Commission into the future. We note that a disproportionate number of Irish nationals currently hold senior roles but that many are due to retire in the coming years. The Committee was told of the imperative of encouraging Irish graduates to pursue career opportunities in Brussels.”
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Committee Membership
Deputies: Eric Byrne, Seán Crowe, Timmy Dooley, Bernard J. Durkan, John Halligan, Dominic Hannigan (Chair), Seán Kyne, Dara Murphy (Vice-Chair) and Joe O’Reilly
Senators: Colm Burke, John Kelly, Terry Leyden, Catherine Noone and Kathryn Reilly