Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank first all the Deputies who contributed to this debate. It will help to inform the Irish position at this week’s European Council.

When I spoke last week on the budget, I said it would copper-fasten the stability that has been so hard-won here in Ireland. I also said that as a country, we had been through too much to put that stability and our ongoing recovery at risk. It is precisely those same principles – securing stability and recovery – that will guide the Government’s approach in Brussels tomorrow and on Friday. It is in Ireland’s interest and in all of Europe’s interest that there is no momentum lost on the Union’s jobs and growth agenda.

Throughout the first half of this year, the Irish EU Presidency succeeded in moving the European Union from pure crisis management to focusing on real measures which make a real difference to people, backed by real resources. When the last European Council took place in late June, the Taoiseach and I had at that stage just reached agreement with the European Parliament on an investment budget of almost €1 trillion from 2014 to 2020. We led a relentless drive for an EU-wide response to the scourge of youth unemployment, with real results in the form of a youth guarantee recommendation and an €8 billion youth employment initiative focused on those most affected. We delivered the results we aimed for on banking union, from the single supervisory mechanism to capital requirements rules, including limits on bankers’ bonuses. We secured a mandate for an eventual EU-US trade agreement as a key driver for growth, and we put momentum behind Europe’s digital agenda, including through hosting a major digital assembly in Dublin Castle towards the end of our Presidency.

If anyone needed proof of the effect of these results and the momentum they created, they would just have to look at the agenda of this week’s European Council meeting: the digital economy; innovation and services; combating youth unemployment; SME financing; better monitoring of social developments in economic policy co-ordination; and the next steps towards completing a banking union - an issue for this European Council and all European Councils. In response to Deputy Ross, we will insist that every decision taken fully delivers on the euro area leaders' solemn commitment of June 2012 to break the vicious circle between sovereigns and banks.

Stability, jobs and growth formed the lens through which we examined and advanced the Union’s priorities in the first half of 2013, but it is no less relevant now as a test for our work at national and EU levels. Economic, social and financial issues continue to be the ones most closely affecting our people, and so are the issues on which EU leaders must continue to focus.

There are many important issues of national interest on the agenda for this week’s European Council, but we particularly want tomorrow’s meeting to give real impetus and real support to the digital sector. At European level, the digital sector is an enormous source of growth and we must exploit its full potential. Nationally, we have a substantial industrial presence in this sector - multinational and also indigenous - but most important of all is the potential of this sector to create the growth and employment we need and jobs in particular for young people.

We know there are current and potential vacancies in ICT companies that are not being filled because of skills shortages. ICT education, vocational training in ICT and retraining all have the potential to create new job prospects and new hope for this generation, a generation disproportionately affected by the economic and financial crisis.

At EU level, we need to get the right regulatory framework in place to enable and encourage growth in the digital sector.

We were pleased the Irish Presidency was able to progress work on key digital and innovation files, including collective rights management, e-identification, data protection and cyber security. However, work here must continue apace. The European Council should underline our determination to complete the digital single market by 2015. At the same time, we must ensure the impact of Horizon 2020 is maximised to provide research funding.

We will approach the entire European Council with considerable experience on each item, both from our Presidency and our national experience in recent years. Above all, we will push for the momentum to be maintained and, indeed, ramped up so that the Union's fragile recovery can be fully stabilised and then grown, just as we are doing here at home. Ireland needs the EU as a whole to achieve this, just as the Union has needed Ireland to emerge from its programme, which we will do in less than two months time.

I refer to the agenda items on eastern partnership, migration and some foreign policy issues likely to arise. The inclusion of the eastern partnership item is an initiative of our successors as EU President, Lithuania. They are perfectly positioned to drive this particular agenda and the Vilnius summit next month will mark an important step forward in the Union's relationship with its eastern neighbourhood. I saw at first hand during Ireland's OSCE chairmanship in 2012 the great potential of this relationship and political backing from the European Council will be most welcome.

On migration and, in particular, the recent events in the Mediterranean, it is entirely correct that this tragic event is discussed at the European Council. Work has begun already on this. The Justice and Home Affairs Ministers held a detailed discussion on 3 October. The events at Lampedusa were the latest in a series of similar tragic incidents in the Mediterranean in recent years and there was a consensus at the JHA Council on the need for a more focused and concerted Union effort to tackle the problem.

To this end, the discussion concluded with an agreement to establish a joint task force for the Mediterranean, with the participation of the Commission, member states and relevant Union agencies. The task force will be charged with developing an action plan aimed at providing a cohesive response to the problem by combining and, where possible, strengthening the various tools at the Union's disposal. The task force will meet for the first time tomorrow as the European Council concludes and is to submit its first report to the Justice and Home Affairs Council on 5-6 December, ahead of the next European Council of 19-20 December.

Again, I thank Deputies for contributions. We will be back to report on the outcome of the Council in two weeks time.

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