Colm Brophy (Dublin South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Some of my points have been raised already, so I will not go over them again. I would like to tease one point out further. There is a fundamental difference between a sovereign state and a national parliament legislating in a particular way. The European Union, which is a confederation of national states, is engaging in the legislative process that it has put together. I welcome a lot of the work that the Ms O'Reilly has gone into around this because I have always advocated as a passionate pro-European that one of the most significant problems we have is the way in which national governments will consistently blame the European Union or a faceless bureaucrat in the European Commission for some piece of legislation that they do not like, whereas if it is a project that has received funding, it will be the national government's success when the funded project is completed.

What worries me - and I would be interested to learn how the European Ombudsman has looked at this - is that as much failure as there is in the process of a closed door discussion between sovereign governments trying to harmonise their position, it has by and large delivered a lot of things which have significantly benefited Europe and Ireland during our period of membership of the European Union. If we go down the path of a far more open and transparent process at that stage, has the European Ombudsman considered what the repercussions could be in terms of member states effectively taking the bit of the process that they do not want to be made public outside of that structure, having private sidebar conversations and dealing off the official agenda, so that we actually end up knowing less about what is happening? I would hope that Ireland would find it perfectly okay to operate in an open and transparent way but I have no doubt that there would be other member states where that would be very alien to their process of operating. What would worry me is that in adjusting the current process we could end up with a worse process, where more of the actual initial stages of putting together legislation take place in a completely untransparent way. Has Ms O'Reilly looked at that and how does she think some of the processes she wants to engage in will ensure that does not happen?