Professor Gavin Barrett:

Thank heaven they did, because we would not have a euro at this stage without them. It is, though, a kind of a second-best way to go about things on the other hand. Similarly, in respect of the funds being generated for the NextGenerationEU package, it is amazing this was done without any treaty changes. Thank heaven it was, but again this was a bit of a second-best way.

Deputy Howlin's second point was on autocracy in the EU. There is definitely a problem in this regard, and, as the Deputy correctly remarked, it is often cited just in the cases of Hungary and Poland, and more recently with Slovakia. As the Deputy said, it is not, however, just a problem with those countries. We have a treaty mechanism in the form of Article 7 of the Treaty on Europe Union, TEU, which is deficient and does not work. This is because insofar as it involves a warning mechanism, it lacks teeth, while insofar as it involves suspending the rights of member states, it has to be agreed unanimously. For a long time, Poland made clear it would not vote against Hungary and Hungary made clear it would not vote against Poland. Effectively, therefore, it just does not work.

We need treaty change and this process needs to be undertaken by qualified majority voting procedure, or at least needs to have a lesser requirement to get around the difficulty, which was never foreseen, in which more than one member state has problems. However, we also need a change of attitude on the part of the member states as well. For instance, Article 7 has never got near being used because the Council simply does not want to use it.

The Council has to confront the fact that we have a serious problem in Hungary and we had a serious problem in Poland and it will not go away. If it were to spread as far as France, we would really be in trouble. Treaty change is part of the solution but it is certainly not the whole solution.

The Deputy is absolutely correct that it exposed inadequacies in foreign policy. Jean-Claude Piris has also made the point that legal solutions cannot be provided to political problems. The fact that there is no agreement on foreign policy - the Deputy gave the good example of the situation in Gaza on which member states do not agree, as can be seen from how they vote at the UN - cannot be solved by reform of the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Yet, other things can be solved by its reform. There was pretty much universal agreement on the Ukraine war, but what is happening at the moment is that Hungary is quite frankly blackmailing the other member states. It wants access to European Union funds and it refuses to approve anything that relates to Ukraine unless it gets those funds. A workaround will be found for that, which will probably involve member states going outside the European Union to take action together, as was the case with the European Monetary Union, EMU. We need to see some changes, but I am entirely in agreement with Deputy Howlin that the changes in the Common Foreign and Security Policy will not solve the fact that different member states have different approaches to foreign policy matters. There is no doubt about that.

The Deputy mentioned that a previous witness who was before the committee dismissed the Franco-German paper.