Mr. Brian Hayes:

I thank the Chairman and members. It is a privilege to be here. I congratulate the Ceann Comhairle, Oireachtas Commission and the Chairman on managing to have proceedings of the House and committees live on television. There will also be a facility whereby various sessions of the European Parliament, either plenary or committee, can be viewed on the channel. It is a very welcome development.

It is important that as one of the 11 Irish MEPs elected for this State that we keep in constant discussion and engagement not just with the important Joint Committee on European Union Affairs but with the various sectoral committees. Ms Boylan, MEP, has outlined the work she is doing in her area of policy. It would be important in whatever area in which we are engaging that we would have discussion with the sectoral committees. I have a few ideas that the members might be interested in hearing.
It is an extraordinary privilege to be elected by the people of Dublin as one of the new Irish MEPs and I am very grateful to them for giving me this mandate during the next five years. As a former Member of both Houses of the Oireachtas for more than 18 years, it is important that as an Irish MEP one is in the first instance an ambassador for one's country. I regard myself as an Irish MEP first and a Fine Gael MEP second. As we have only 11 Irish MEPs, it is crucially important that people work together and we put the interest of the country before that of our political parties. That is important. We are a small country and as Mr. Jacobs said, out of the 751 members of the European Parliament, Ireland has only 11 representatives. It is important that colleagues work together for the interests of the country rather than marginal party political issues, which because of our adversarial system of politics sometimes get played out in Dáil for all sorts of reasons. The European Parliament is different, it works to a different degree and we should utilise it as 11 MEPs working together.
This is a real Parliament with real power. I have responsibility for the economic area on behalf of the Fine Gael MEPs. Some 70% of all financial regulation of all financial law across the 28 members states of the European Union is determined in co-decision making between the European Parliament and the Council. Irrespective of what happens in budgets in this country or in other countries, the great majority of law in how we organise our financial system across the eurozone and across the 29 members states as a whole is determined by the European Parliament and by the Council. It is most definitely a Parliament with real teeth and real power.
I am a member of the European People's Party, EPP, and it has 221 of the 751 MEPs. Effectively we have an informal coalition with the Social Democrats. It is sometimes ignored but it is worth saying that 70% of the Members of the newly elected Parliament come from a pro-European tradition when there is a commentary about En France Front national or UKIP or other populist neo-nationalist parties. It is sometimes ignored that the great majority of European citizens who voted last May voted for pro-European MEPs, irrespective of whether they come from the Centre Right, the Centre or the Centre Left. We need to keep that in mind.
I am a member of the Economic Affairs Committee of the Parliament, the only full Irish member on this very important committee that deals with the vast amount of financial regulation that goes through it. It takes up about 80% of my time. I will set out the issues I am working on, comment on where we need to improve our relationship with the committee and speak about some of the big issues that affect the mandate we have for the next five years.
I have a very simple view about what is coming down the tracks. I asked the Irish Permanent Representative in Brussels to rate on a scale of five to one, five being the most significant and one being the least significant, what is important for Ireland. I work on the basis that what is in important to Ireland should gain our attention as Irish MEPs. We are not just there to create legislation across the 500 million citizens across the European Union. We are also there to defend the Irish interest and the Irish position.
When I came to the European Parliament, I worked very hard to get on the ECON committee. Money markets reform is a crucial issue. Let me explain it. A third of all the money that comes into the financial services system in this country is money markets. Money markets is a kind of financial warehouse, it provides short-term funding that the banks get to improve their liquidity. The proposals put forward by Commissioner Michel Barnier, would have effectively brought to an end a third of all the moneys that are coming into Ireland, were they advanced last March and would have knocked out thousand of Irish jobs, especially in Dublin, our constituency. When I discovered the importance of this issue, I worked within my own group to ensure that I could become the lead rapporteur for that file. I acknowledge that we must resolve the problem, a liquidity problem for money markets but we must also do it in a way that does not adversely affect employment opportunities in this country. I will stand up and defend every Irish job and do so unapologetically. As the EPP rapporteur for that area, it was crucially important that I got that job.
The second area I am working on with colleagues is the economic semester. As members know country specific recommendations which come from the semester come through the Commission onto the Council and they are then made as recommendations, which the countries are asked to consider. We recently had a good example of good parliamentary engagement. The Chairman of the Finance Committee, Deputy Ciaran Lynch came to the ECON committee of the EU. He presented the view of his committee, which was very clear, that there should be a greater period of time between the Commission's recommendations and the Council's acceptance of it, so that the members of the Houses of the Oireachtas could engage on the recommendations. I am trying to get the recommendation that the Chairman of the European Affairs committee, through Deputy Lynch, as a central feature of the report that is going through my committee. It is a small but good example of why we need to engage with each other to make sure that the voice of the national parliament is not overlooked in this deliberative process.
I am involved in a monetary dialogue with the President of the ECB, Mario Draghi. Members may have seen me last week putting very clear questions to him, arguing why the ECB needs to be involved in any banking inquiry that will take place in Ireland so that the ECB's role in respect of 2000 and 2008 in the decisions that were taken are held to account in this forum, so that Irish parliamentarians can hear from the ECB. I have forcefully put that view to him.