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

I welcome our guests and, in particular, I welcome my former constituency colleague, former Deputy and former Minister, Mr. Alan Dukes. It is good to see him before the committee again and to see him being consistent in the pursuit of the European concept. Both he and Mr. Tutty equally have considerable mileage established in this area and they both are to be congratulated. On the European semester, I was one of those who suggested it in the first instance on the basis that it was not feasible to wait five or ten years before assessing the effectiveness of a particular strategy such as the Lisbon Agenda and so on. My question is simply whether the witnesses think the semester is sufficiently forensically investigative and whether it monitors sufficiently the progress of Europe in the intervening period. In other words, is it better than the previous position?

In addition, it has been referred to many times but I could not let the occasion pass without mentioning my own pet hate, which is my belief that Europe can never really be Europe united unless there is a single currency right across Europe. While I do not expect our guests to make a fundamental conclusion in this regard but I strongly believe that had the United States a multiplicity of currencies over the past ten or 15 years, it would no longer exist. Unfortunately, Europe continues to pretend it can exist with a multiplicity of currencies. It is beneficial to some countries within a situation in which they live next door to a particular currency. Such countries can live off that and can get benefits from it. While they also can encounter negative consequences, the point at issue simply is that achieving economic and monetary union will never happen until there is a single currency. I do not know how feasible that might be and I invite our guests to comment in this regard.

The witnesses may wish to comment on a difficult point, which is the extent to which they expect Europe to progress economically, in the fiscal sense and the political sense in the future, given that a number of countries have expressed views that would appear to be at variance with the European concept. The issue of Brexit is one that will have implications for all of Europe and for the United Kingdom. It could have really serious implications for Ireland, as well as for other European countries. My final point concerns those who state the economic crisis was as a result of austerity, that is, those who suggest that austerity was the cause of the problem. The guests may wish to answer on that point but I believe that was not the case. I believe the cause of the problem was bad management, bad fiscal policy, bad economic policies and failure to take corrective action on time. To what extent do the witnesses think these issues now have been addressed?