Mr. James Temple-Smithson:

I thank the Chairman for inviting me to address the committee. It is a great honour to appear before the committee today. I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak a little about the work and role of the European Parliament Information Office in Ireland. As the committee heard, I became head of the office recently. If I may, I will divide what I will say into three sections. I will speak a little about our day-to-day work. Then I will speak about the relations between the European Parliament and national parliaments, in particular the Houses of the Oireachtas. Then I will say a few words on the big communications challenges I see over the next couple of years, which include those relating to Brexit and the European elections that are looming in 2019.

It is important to underline that the parameters for everything we do are set out for us by the governing body of the European Parliament - the bureau - which is made up of the President and the Vice-Presidents. They set our terms of reference and approve our major projects. I think our annual report has been circulated to the committee. As it will see from the report, in a nutshell our job is to communicate about the work and role of the European Parliament and its members to Irish audiences. There are four strands that we pursue, although I will not speak about them in detail, except to give some examples.

The core of our work relates to parliamentary activity and communication activities we undertake with regard to the agenda of the European Parliament. For example, early last month we held what we called a stakeholder consultation on the posted workers directive, to which we were delighted to welcome Senator Craughwell, one of the committee's colleagues. We gathered 20 or so of the organisations that are most impacted by and that would have the most impact on this controversial proposed legislation and gave them an opportunity to discuss with the rapporteur and draughtsman of the legislation, who came over from Brussels. They had the opportunity to hear from her and to give their thoughts on the legislation at an early stage. The legislation was due for its first committee discussion immediately after our event, which was chaired by Ms Deirdre Clune, MEP.

We have a series of programmes related to youth, mainly through the education system, where we provide information to teachers and students in primary and secondary schools, particularly transition year students, as well as in further education institutions.

There is an important media strand to our work. We work with Irish journalists to provide information about the European Parliament. Our press officer is extremely busy at the moment because the Taoiseach will be in Brussels meeting the President of the European Parliament tomorrow, as I am sure the committee know. We also have a large number of Irish journalists attending the plenary session in March because it is widely anticipated that there will be some Brexit developments. They might not take place in the Parliament but they may take place about that time and the Parliament will be an important actor.

The final aspect to our communications activities is that we no longer just do things and hope for the best. We really try to measure the impact of our work. In common with all parts of the European Parliament, we have key performance indicators. We are still working through the methodology for the indicator for communications. It is not a precise science and it is not finalised. We have not got the magic formula yet, but our key metric is the hours of attention that we are able to generate for our work.

I will now turn to Parliament relations. I have to mention an important caveat, which is that the first Vice-President of the European Parliament is one of the Irish MEPs responsible for relations with national parliaments. I wish to make clear that I am not speaking on her behalf here. She is new to the role, being just a few weeks into it. What I am speaking about, therefore, is everything that went before she took over. I have not had the opportunity to discuss with her directly. I would like to make that clear. I am sure she will have ideas of her own that she will develop over the coming months and we look forward to following up on them.

There is one other important preliminary remark to be made. The Chairman referred to this in his opening remarks and in a sense I know that I am preaching to the converted because the Oireachtas is widely recognised as one of the most progressive and proactive national parliaments in terms of engaging with the European processes and the European Parliament. The Chairman referred to MEPs attending the committee's hearings and the committee heard how much that was valued from the Vice-President of the Commission, Mr. Timmermans, when he was here last week, when Brian Hayes was here to put questions to him. I know the committee makes use of video-conferencing. This is a technology that the European Parliament has invested in. We think it offers a great deal of potential to help join up the levels, particularly between ourselves and European Parliaments. I would like to underline that we in our office enjoy extremely good contact at official level with the committee's clerk, Ms Lougheed, and with its representative in Brussels, Ms Hayes. We very much value those relationships and are keen to develop them.

The committee does not need me to go over the established mechanisms that the Chairman referred to such as COSAC and the yellow card. However, it is fair to say that the European Parliament in recent years has been keen to develop relations with national parliaments, both formally and informally, through the interparliamentary meetings that the Chairman mentioned. This week there is one on asylum and next week there will be one related to International Women's Day and women in the labour market. Although I know that there are some reservations about it, I think the European Parliament has been keen to develop the notion of a green card concept as a sort of counterpoint to the yellow card.

On the less formal side, there is now a process where the European Parliament writes, on the back of the Commission work programme each year, to national parliaments. Under the current Commission we have identified in each work programme that there are perhaps 20 to 25 important pieces of new legislation that are, in fact, reviews of existing legislation.

That implies a slight change in the business model of the European Parliament, which has traditionally been focused on passing new legislation. When that new legislation is reviewing legislation that already exists, we are shifting a bit. The European Parliament wants to take a more holistic approach. It is recognised that close partnership with national parliaments is very important in that respect. Where there is existing legislation, national parliaments are perhaps best placed to inform whether that legislation has worked, has been implemented, has achieved what it is supposed to achieve, has been defective or is in fact totally fine and does not need reviewing. There are the established processes of White Papers and Green Papers tabled by the commission. It is important for a parallel process to take place at parliamentary level. That is something the European Parliament has been pushing with this initiative. In this context, we were very pleased to receive substantial and interesting input from the agriculture committee on some of the proposals in the work programme last year.

In a slight side note to that, we have established on the parliament's website relatively recently a repository for information and studies about the implementation of European legislation, which is open to anyone, national parliaments, local councils and local authorities, to upload work that they have undertaken that is then available to other jurisdictions and to MEPs. It free for anyone to upload or download. We hope that will help to join some of the dots that are perhaps not joined at the moment in the EU system.

The final point I want to mention about the connection between the parliaments is the European Parliamentary Research Service, EPRS, established in 2013. It has a clear remit to co-operate with the research and library services of national parliaments. I know that it has good contacts with Ireland's own Library and Research Service. We believe that the research that our EPRS does can compliment the work of the research services of national parliaments, which inevitably have to focus their limited resources on the domestic agenda. With the scale and expertise we can offer, we believe it can help with the understanding of European developments. Last year, the EPRS produced over 1,000 products that ranged from two-page at-a-glance summaries of items on the parliamentary agenda up to detailed and in-depth analyses and studies that really got to grips with policy challenges and proposals.

Before I conclude, I will say a quick word on where these two worlds of communicating about the European Parliament and relations between parliaments collide. That is at the members' initiative. We are now looking at ways in which we can work with Deputies and Senators to provide to them information about the products and services we can offer that can help them in their work in the European dimension and help with communication on European matters where it is of assistance to them. One thing we would like to do in that respect is invite Members or their staff to a training day in Europe House where we can set out some of these databases and European information sources that we hope will be helpful. We hope to be in contact with Deputies and Senators shortly about that.

I said that I would say a couple of words on the challenges ahead. Brexit is obviously a challenge in all walks of life and no less in communications. It is funny that it is the reverse of a problem we often have when we are communicating about the European Parliament, which is that we often have a lot of information that we are desperately trying to interest people in. Whereas with regard to Brexit, a lot of people are desperately interested in it, but so far we have not had that much information to communicate. I guess that after Article 50 is triggered, that will change. Once the European Parliament passes its resolution, which we anticipate will happen before Easter, we will have a basis for ourselves to communicate about the position of the parliament.

The Chairman referred to the committee's visit to Brussels recently. Members met the key players, Mr. Verhofstadt, Mr. Barnier and other MEPs. The committee is well-informed about this issue. Once we move into the spring, I anticipate that we will step up our efforts in this area when the parliament has set out a position. For example, we are planning an event in Dundalk in May to look at the impact on environmental policy in the cross-Border context of Brexit. Once the debate gets into the nitty-gritty a bit more, I anticipate that we will identify more areas in which we can usefully add value by arranging that sort of discussion and event.

We are just starting to think seriously now about our institutional information campaign that we will conduct with regard to the European elections. To be very clear, that is not at all the political campaign that will go on separately. We conduct an institutional information campaign that is, of course, politically neutral by which our aim is to inform people of the fact of the European elections, that they are taking place and a little bit about what is at stake. In particular, as we have done in the past, I imagine this time we will put a focus on young people and first-time voters who are traditionally less likely to turn out and try to encourage them to register and vote in these elections.

We are just starting to think about these challenges. Much has changed in political communications over the last year. There are more elections this year in which more will change. It is already clear that some of the challenges we will face include tackling fake news by providing fast and accurate information to members. How we will work with our partners in Ireland on this project is something else that we are looking at. In this area in particular, I would very much welcome any input and thoughts from members. That would be extremely instructive for me. I thank the committee for its attention. I would be delighted to respond to any remarks or questions.