Neale Richmond (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman and I apologise again for leaving the meeting for votes. I have some queries and I apologise in advance if colleagues have touched on these.

My first question is for the director general, Ms O'Donoghue, and relates to the interparliamentary aspect of building new alliances. Can we do more? Before the abolition of the dual mandate, and even further back before the introduction of direct elections to the European Parliament, one of the EU's great strengths was that domestic parliamentarians were engaging with other domestic parliamentarians on a European level about European issues. The main outlet for this debate currently is though the regular Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs, COSAC,meetings that some of us attend and the COSAC chairpersons' meeting. Is there a way to increase that engagement across the sectoral basis so that it is not just a biannual COSAC meeting and it reflects, for example, agricultural issues prior to the Agriculture Council meetings to nail it down? I appreciate that this would require a level of commitment and investment from member state national parliaments.

MEPs are great but they have a distinct role in the European Parliament and, to some extent, they leave their domestic constituencies behind. Member state parliamentarians engaging with others on issues at a European level would increase awareness of the debate and the importance of that debate at a domestic level.

I did not disagree with anything that was said on the EU jobs aspect but I want to pick up on two issues, one of which I raised with Catherine Day at our last meeting but to which she was not too receptive. We have our derogation for Irish and that is being rolled out to an extent but when the UK leaves the EU, Ireland and Malta will be the only English speaking countries, although neither of us uses English as our first language at EU level. We accept that English has been the working language of the EU since 2004 but how can we ensure that English is given that level of importance and how can Ireland maximise that?

The EU jobs campaign in third level institutions here, the work of the Council of Europe and the work the Kings Inns does with lawyer-linguists is brilliant. Mr. Hackett might have a more contemporary view on this but there is a population of Irish people in Brussels working in the private sector, trade associations, not-for-profit organisations or in political roles who are turning down work in the Commission or the other institutions because they are intimidated by the application procedure, not because of money, circumstances or interest in the work. How can we identify and work with people who have committed to life in Brussels, Luxembourg, Strasbourg or wherever it may be and say to them that now that they have been working half a dozen years for, say, a trade association in the private sector it would be much more rewarding on many levels for them to be in the Commission, the Council, the Parliament or the secretariat? How do we target that audience? I stand corrected but I believe many people are in that space. When I went over to do my stagiairevery few of the people who stayed on are in the Commission, the Council or the parliament. They are in non-institutional roles but they are still in Brussels. They may have married people from other member states and have committed to spending their lives there but how do we get them to buy in?

I refer to the role of a permanent representative in particular. It was a great shame that, post Presidency in 2013, we de-scaled to an extent the permanent representation. I hope we learned the lesson that we should not do that again and that we should maintain not just the size of but the commitment to the permanent representation post Brexit regardless of what happens. We have seen the benefit of having a very strong presence in Brussels from the institutional focus.

Mr. Hackett went through the presentation in so much detail I put a strike through many of the questions I had intended to ask. I refer to many of the policy areas that are vitally important when we talk about new alliances but one area in particular brings that together, that is, the overall approach to the budget and the MFF. I am concerned that due to ongoing delays with the Brexit negotiations and everything else we are behind the curve when it comes to the MFF negotiations, we are coming at it late and we are leaving too short a period for the negotiation, be it at parliamentary level, in the European Parliament, or at Commission or Council level. I fear we may be trying to pass a European budget in such a truncated time that easy and quick decisions will be made. How do we work with allies to make sure that we do not simply get tired at the end and that a process that we might have given 18 months to but, due to circumstances, we will only be able to give 12 months to will still be as thorough and as detailed in the atmosphere of competing interests and certain member states wanting to cut the budget and move from investment to the CAP perhaps to further security and defence? How can we ensure our alliances protect that?

Moving from the wider EU perspective but staying with the European context, I am delighted about the further opening of a consulate in Frankfurt but we need to go beyond Frankfurt and look at a second French city, be it Lyon or Nice or Marseille, in the south. We should be looking also at Barcelona in Spain and Milan in Italy, among others. We should be looking at the commercial centres as well as the administrative centres. That is where there is an opportunity. It is difficult at times for politicians to justify spending on diplomacy and on our reach abroad. Much great work has been shown in terms of the value of having a strong diplomatic corps, particularly in the past two or three years, but we should ask about the return on investment. We are investing in consuls and in Ireland houses. We are bringing in Enterprise Ireland and the other State agencies, including Bord Bia and IDA Ireland. These are not just serving the Irish population abroad or handling intergovernmental queries. They are bringing serious investment to Ireland and to Irish people. When we look at the commercial centres around Europe, that is as important as everything else.

That brings me to my final point regarding the United Kingdom. I very much welcome the reopening of the consulate in Cardiff but in terms of the aim to open another consulate in the UK, is it easy to identify that that should be in the northern powerhouse region of Manchester or, moving away from the economic aspect, is there a diaspora consular approach to the midlands, be it Birmingham or Coventry? I would appreciate Mr. Hackett's opinions on that.