Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Dr. Barrett on his compilation. It is extremely interesting. The fact that it criticises some of our activity, or lack of activity, is no harm. First, we need a considerable amount of time to digest it and discuss it at length with Dr. Barrett. There is little sense in producing such a report and doing nothing about it afterwards.

I strongly disagree with some of it, as Dr. Barrett will readily expect. There is a contradiction in the simultaneous growth in strength of the national parliaments and the European Parliament. They are on a conflict course; they must be. If I am a Member of the European Parliament, I will naturally resent other members states' national parliaments influencing to too great an extent what I am trying to do and, regardless of whether I like it, I will have an affinity with my own country. That is the European parliamentarian's perspective. I mean no disrespect to my colleague but if I were a Member of the European Parliament, and I have no intention of ever being one, that would be my perspective.

By the same token, for the Member of the Parliament in this country, there is a resentment, which we see around us all the time, of being forced to accept directives coming from Brussels and things happening outside our control. Dr. Barrett made an important point. In national parliaments there is a lack in the sense of taking ownership of the European project.

That is a fact. Also, in our nearest neighbour there is a total avoidance of taking ownership of the European project, which in turn can lead only to a dysfunctional European structure at some stage, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. There is a lack of cohesion in the evolution to which he has referred. It does not work that way.

The Chairman and I were here when decisions were taken to restructure the role of the Joint Committee on European Union Affairs. The intention was that the committee would have an overarching role in scrutiny. That does not happen. The reason, which has been borne out by previous experience, is that when Departments wish to get something through a committee system they can do so by finding the most friendly committee. That is what happens and, human nature being what it is, it will continue to happen. It does not happen so much at present because, to be fair to the previous and current Ministers, they address the committee. The Tánaiste comes before this committee before, during and after his meetings in Europe, so there is not much more we can do about that. An aspect that Dr. Barrett has not referred to is how Ministers and Deputies make themselves available for a sufficient length of time to be able to deal with the matters at issue. That has not been dealt with by anybody during my time on this committee or associated committees. In an experiment we conducted some years ago, which is being done now to some extent in a different way, we had a consultant who scrutinised everything beforehand. It automatically followed that the issues we wanted to discuss at a particular time had already been discussed a long time before. The consultancy and members scrutinised the proposals prior to the drafting stage and we were alerted as to what was coming down the tracks. We dealt with them effectively then. We did not deal with the proposals on turf cutting. I do not claim any responsibility for that because I was not a member of the committee at that stage. It is ironic. This is where members of a committee must always be alert to the implications of what is happening before it becomes a reality.

I would like the Chairman to agree to a longer debate on this issue in the not-too-distant future. If we are to make a response, it should be a worthwhile response and we should address the issues.

On the question of a single committee versus a sectoral committee, I remember making the point years ago that in order to do that effectively the committee would need to meet for an hour every day the House sits.