Ms Phil Prendergast:

I welcome Mr. Lidington to the Irish Parliament. I sit on Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection in Europe, excellently chaired by Malcolm Harbour who does a huge amount of work, and there is very good integration among the different countries in getting directives through and preparing legislation. I am currently shadow rapporteur on the e-signatures directive which is moving apace and we expect to vote on it in committee next month. It will then go to plenary session. There is probably a skewed interpretation of UKIP because it gets many of the soundbites in the plenary sessions and it always appears as if the MEPs from the UK that are involved are very anti-everything which is absolutely not the case. I work with many of the UK MEPs and we work very hard in difficult circumstances.

One of the issues that concerns us, in terms of European Affairs Ministers meeting with the Council and the Commission, is that parliament has repeatedly voted for a single seat. Despite having had several votes in plenary session, we continue to incur a cost €180 million with the decanting of the entire service to Strasbourg once a month. It is an issue that will come much more to fore because we are going to make it a platform issue for next year's European elections. Does Mr. Lidington have any comment to make on that?