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JOINT COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 28 Apr 2010

Business of Joint Committee.

I ask members to ensure their mobile telephones are switched off for the duration of the meeting because they cause interference with the recording system. The minutes of the meeting of Tuesday, 13 April have been circulated. Are they agreed? Agreed. We have one item of correspondence from the Joint Committee on European Scrutiny concerning decisions taken by that committee at its meeting of 20 April. It is proposed that this be noted. Is that agreed? Agreed.

I have no difficulty leaving the following point to the end of our meeting. We had a presentation at this committee on economic partnership agreements with African regions. New agreements are at an advanced stage and on the last occasion we had a number of agreements on a small scale put through without much scrutiny. It is important we have an opportunity to examine the three major agreements proposed for Africa, the South African Development Community agreement, the agreement on south-eastern Africa and one concerning southern Africa. It is a scrutiny matter and what happened on the previous occasion was that in the absence of an opportunity for such scrutiny the agreement came before a plenary session of the Dáil with a recommendation to be adopted without discussion. I am warning that we should find out where we are on this matter.

We will do that.

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