Mr. Francis Jacobs:

We have seen this happen on numerous occasions in the past. When members leave a group which was just over the margin, the group is dissolved and no longer exists, unless it can manage to recruit members from elsewhere. Marie le Pen and some of the other far-right MEPs were very close to forming a group but failed to do so in the end. What that means is that we now have an exceptionally large number of non-attached members of the European Parliament, totalling 52 out of 751. The majority, although not all of them, are from the far right.

Once the groups have been constituted, the process of distributing members between committees begins. That distribution is very proportional in the European Parliament and is based on the d'Hondt system, in contrast to the US Congress, where it tends to be winner-takes-all. In the US, if one party has one more seat than the other, it wins all of the committee chairs.

Martin Schulz was re-elected President of the European Parliament, which was a remarkable development. It was the first time that happened since direct elections in 1979. Due to the large number of groups in the European Parliament, there was always a tendency to have a changeover after two and a half years so the re-election of Mr. Schulz was really exceptional. Next was the election of Vice Presidents and Questors. Ms Mairead McGuinness was elected as a Vice President of the Parliament, which is the second most senior post an Irish MEP has held since Mr. Pat Cox was President.

Membership of the various committees is very important and I am sure Ms Boylan and Mr. Hayes will speak about that later. The role of committee chairperson is also very important but there is currently no Irish chair of a committee. The delegation leaders have not been finally confirmed yet but is expected to be completed in a week or two.

An important question, apart from who becomes chair and vice chair of committees, is who will be the political group co-ordinators on a committee. They are the people who represent their political group on each committee and take part in the decisions on what work the committee will do and who will draw up its reports and opinions. They play a really important strategic role in the work of the Parliament. There are two Irish co-ordinators in political groups. One is Ms Liadh Ní Riada who is the GUE-NGL group co-ordinator on the Committee on Budgets and the other is Ms Marian Harkin, the co-ordinator for the ALDE group on the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs. We do not know yet who will be rapporteurs for the Parliament. The rapporteurs are the people who are asked to draw up the Parliament's reports on all EU legislation and to prepare initiative reports. Of almost equal importance is the question of who will be appointed as shadow rapporteurs. A shadow rapporteur is appointed by his or her political family to deal with particular subjects. Mr. Hayes, for example, is a shadow rapporteur on the capital markets proposal.

That is the basic background information on what has happened since the elections in June and I am very happy to answer any questions members may have in that regard. Before concluding, however, I wish to deal with the Parliament's involvement in the election of the European Commission which is so topical this week.

The most important development before the elections was the fact that five of the seven political groups, for the first time ever, decided to put forward lead candidates whom they wanted to be President of the Commission if they won sufficient seats in the Parliament. There was a lot of scepticism about it. Some political leaders, including Prime Minister David Cameron in the UK, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary and others were very opposed to the system and even Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed reservations. In the end, however, the five main groups in the Parliament decided that they would put forward candidates and the EPP candidate, Jean-Claude Junker was chosen at a meeting in the Convention Centre in Dublin. I mention this because it has had an important impact in the sense that it has provided a greater buy-in than in the past between the European Parliament and the Commission. That was made clear when Mr. Junker was elected, relatively smoothly, in the second July session of the Parliament. He got well over the necessary majority. The majority required is an absolute majority of the members of the Parliament, not a relative one. A candidate needs to get 376 votes to be elected. That was not the case in the past and some past Presidents of the Commission would not have been elected under the new rules, post-Lisbon. Mr. Junker got 422 votes, with 250 members voting against him and 47 abstaining.

In many ways he got a rather good majority, all things considered.

Once the President is chosen, the next stage is member states putting forward their nominees, with the European Parliament considering not only those nominees, but the structure of the Commission as a whole. A really difficult question for much of the summer was whether there would be a sufficient gender balance, as almost all the early nominees were men, and it looked as if the critical threshold that would have satisfied the European Parliament might not have been met. In the end, nine female nominees were put forward and I am sure there will be a view as to whether there is sufficient gender balance; it was enough to defuse the issue.

Once the nominees were finally put forward, with Marianne Thyssen, MEP, being the final nomination at the very end of August, the next question was who would be allocated which job within the Commission. When the Parliament votes, it does not consider individual Commissioners but rather the Commission as a whole. It also considers the programme of a new Commission for the next few years and its structure, which will be put forward by Mr. Juncker. I am sure the President of the European Commission will go into more detail later but he has chosen a structure which has never before been chosen. In addition to the Commissioners with portfolios and specific director generals backing them up, there are also a number of Vice Presidents of the Commission with more of a co-ordinating role. How that will work is a very difficult and important question. The structure of the hearings is that potential Commissioners with individual portfolios are being grilled this week, with the Vice President nominees being grilled by the Parliament on Monday afternoon and Tuesday next week. The entire process is supposed to end on Tuesday.

Why are there hearings in the first place? In the early days there were no such hearings but after the Maastricht treaty came into force in the early 1990s, the European Parliament had a slightly greater role in the choice of the Commission - not as strong as now - and it felt that hearings would be a really useful way of finding out the quality of the individual nominees and in establishing a relationship between the relevant committees of the Parliament and the nominees for the next five years. That had not happened in the past and it was felt to be a really good way of proceeding. There were many reservations within the Commission about this and Mr. Jacques Delors, the outgoing Commission President, advised Mr. Jacques Santer, the incoming Commission President, not to go down this route. Santer was in a rather weak position because he had only just scraped through his vote, and he felt it really important to get the Parliament onside, so he accepted the idea of the hearings. These hearings have taken place since.

I will speak briefly to the process of having hearings on individual candidates. The candidates are asked to submit written answers in advance so that committee members and any interested people can see replies to one or two general questions regarding European commitment, conflicts of interest and so on, as well as specific questions on a prospective portfolio. When I functioned as secretariat of a committee, I experienced the problem of ensuring that all the committees with an interest in a particular nominee would be involved with the hearing. There is a lead committee, and one or two candidates have faced representatives of up to four committees because there is so much overlap. The climate and energy area would overlap a number of parliamentary committees, and there are other areas which have an even stronger reach.

Once this is decided, each nominee - like Mr. Phil Hogan this morning - would speak for a maximum of 15 minutes, with a question-and-answer session following. They would typically start with the co-ordinators of the committee before going to other members of the committee or associated committees. The rule has been established that one minute is allowed per question, with two minutes for the nominee to give an answer. If the question time is exceeded by five seconds or the nominee responding exceeds the allocated time by ten seconds, the microphone is typically cut off by the chairman. This permits a large number of questions, and Mr. Hogan faced 45 questions this morning. At the very end, the nominee can give a five-minute summary.

The committee co-ordinators, which I mentioned before, would meet an hour or so after the hearing to judge how they feel the nominee performed, having sounded out members of their political family. If necessary, they can also convene a full committee meeting and even vote on the issue. They cannot individually reject a nominee but they can write a letter to the President of the Parliament, giving their views on the nominee. The political groups are constantly in touch with each other to discuss how events are proceeding. Several possibilities arise if people are not satisfied with a nominee. One is the writing of a very negative letter, and on a couple of occasions nominees have been asked to answer follow-up questions, and perhaps there could be attempts to convene a follow-up hearing.

Decisions have to be taken on whether to approve a Commission as a whole rather rapidly next week, once hearings conclude. The idea is to vote on the new Commission as a whole in the October plenary session, which is in the third week of October, with the new Commission coming into place in November. In the past, that has not worked because the Parliament has been unhappy with one or more nominees and there has not been time to replace them. In such cases there has been deadlock, and in the worst-case scenario, the process would be delayed for a couple of months. This occurs rarely, although it has happened.