Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I apologise for being late. I had to attend another meeting downtown.

I thank the delegates for the presentation, but I have a cynic's view. I have been hearing about the simplification of European Union rules for 20 years and will hear it for the next 20, but it never happens. I will not say anything further.

The delegates are probably familiar with the saying, "whistling past the graveyard". It means putting the best face on a bad situation. I was fascinated by the line that "the new budget is an opportunity to shape our future as a new ambitious Union of 27 bound together by solidarity. With today's proposal we put forward a pragmatic plan for how to do more with less." I cannot think of too many ways to do much more with much less. We have to make sure those who benefit from the schemes we think are beneficial receive the exact same money and more. That is why I am going to ask a few pertinent questions.

Down the road we will get to the details of how the money will be spent. As I understand it, at this stage the focus is on how much money will be spent and the big frameworks under which it will be spent. We will then have all of the figures for how much will be spent in the various sectors, including agriculture.

Ms Brown referred to "own resources", including a 3% call rate applied to the new common consolidated corporate tax base. What effect will that have on our corporate tax rate if it is introduced? Second, how much is it expected will be collected from non-recycled plastic packaging waste? My suspicion is that, with the ingenuity of industry, the minute this is introduced, it will disappear. It is a bit like when we introduced emissions taxation on cars and we lost a lot of tax as a result because the companies moved away from high emissions to low emissions - some honestly and others a little dishonestly, but they did it. As Ms Brown knows, tax collected on cars post-2008 is much lower than it was pre-2008, even if they are the same engine size. How much does Ms Brown believe will be collected from that?

I want to ask about the bigger financial scene. I hear people in this country proposing that Ireland and other countries would increase their contributions to the EU so we would get more money for CAP. It seems an inefficient way of using our money. It is a bit like producing electricity in the west of Ireland, bringing it over to London and then bringing it all back, even though there are line losses that occur in pure transmission. At the moment we are net contributors to the EU and we pay in more than we get out. For every €1 we pay in, we get something like 90 cent back, and if we pay in €1 billion, we only get €900 million back, if the same rules apply, so there is the first 10% loss. However, for every €100 million extra we put in, how much will go to agriculture and how much will go, for example, to defence? Some of us have moral objections to this promotion of the arms industry, which is not really about defence and is more about attack. What percentage of that €100 million would go to agriculture, which is where we want the money spent, and not to funding massive armies, which is a concern for some of us who do not see that this is the way to bring peace to the world?

If I am right that we would be lucky to get €50 million per €100 million back for agriculture, would it not be better for us to have a higher level of co-funding because there is really no limit in that area? When I was a Minister, only 25% of European money had to be put in and one could put in as much as 75% of one's own money, and there was effectively no limit to how much of one's own money was put in. My question is whether it would be more efficient for us, if we want to put in another €100 million or €200 million to make up the shortfall, to put it straight into the Exchequer. This is particularly the case for Leader because, if it was put straight into Leader funding, we could run Leader continuously and, rather than having this seven-year cycle where we run it for four years, stop for three years and then start again, we could run it for seven years after seven. In money transmission terms, would it not be better to hold onto the money here and use it to have a higher co-funding ratio, rather than giving it over to Brussels and only getting a very small percentage of it back?