Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We are now at the end of the 7th Irish Presidency of the European Union. I am happy to report to this committee that it has, in my view, been a very successful one for the Department of Finance and it has, in many respects, exceeded our expectations when we were planning the Presidency in 2012.

I wish to give the committee an overview of the achievements of the Presidency in the past six months. We had six formal ECOFIN Councils and one highly successful informal ECOFIN in Dublin. Much work was achieved in these Councils in terms of getting agreement on specific files and on managing the business of the Council. However, the Presidency is more than achieving agreement at ECOFIN - important as that is - it is also carried on in work in Council working parties, engagement with the European Parliament and engaging with the European institutions. There is also the practical organisational work which often occurs behind the scenes. Without all this work we would not have had such a successful Presidency.

The aims of the Presidency for the ECOFIN Council were set out in our list of priorities published at the end of 2012. We set ourselves a number of objectives under the broad thematic heading of stability, jobs and growth. We achieved much of what we set out to achieve last January, and I consider that what we proposed to achieve at that stage was, by any standards, an ambitious package of objectives. Indeed, in financial services we have achieved significantly more than was planned. We planned to carry out work on economic governance – principally in the management of the European semester process and in seeking agreement on the two pack of economic surveillance measures for the eurozone. In financial services we prioritised work on the banking union proposals designed to break the link between the financial sector and the sovereign. We targeted agreement on the capital requirements directive, the single supervisory mechanism, and bank resolution and recovery.