Ms Catherine Day:

While the country-specific recommendations will change from year to year, there will be certain long-term trends. We will discuss the new recommendations but year by year, as everybody gets more familiar with it, the national parliaments can also discuss the ongoing recommendations, and 90% of it will be valid for the following year. There should be fewer surprises. A member state should know that if the European Commission has pinpointed something important that was endorsed by the other member states, and that member state has done nothing about it, it would be no surprise if the Commission comes back the following year. As people get used to the system we will find ways of dealing with it. We could also agree collectively to have more time to do a better job. That would be very important.

The Chairman asked about this year's timing. Because the European elections are in late May, the Commission will not be able to produce the recommendations at the end of May as we normally do. We have told the member states that this year we will produce them on 4 June, so the period will be even more squeezed. Maybe it will be so squeezed that it will give us the basis for a debate with the member states on whether we should allow a little more time for the interactive process.

On Irish representation in the Commission, we face a problem in the future. During the Celtic tiger years the Commission salaries were not attractive enough so there is a missing generation of people who in other circumstances would have joined but did not. There may also have been a tinge of euroscepticism in those days which meant people did not join. The cohort there is ageing and many of us will retire in the coming years. The Irish are proportionally over-represented at senior level now but that will evaporate very quickly in a few years because of retirements. The authorities here are concerned about this and are developing ideas on how to deal with it. We must also try to encourage people to see it as a fantastically interesting career opportunity and to encourage people to apply.

There are many different ways to work in the different institutions and the Commission is very concerned to have the appropriate level of geographic balance. Not on any one day but over the course of a year or two years we need to have good representation. We need country-specific knowledge to make informed policy decisions. Very soon we will not have enough Irish people in the Commission and we need an active policy to do something about it. From our side, we will be encouraging that and trying to find ways to support Ireland in doing that, as we do with the other under-represented nationalities.