Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 22 May 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach
Scrutiny of EU Proposals
Ms Lenka Filipkova:
I cannot comment on derogation from any national law. It is not my role and I would assume that, except for these specific cases, there are no other derogations from national laws. On the urgency, we were asked to propose an Act to react quickly to the situation in our defence industry and to the quickly depleting stock, after providing support to Ukraine. We proposed this in May and it was adopted by both the Council and the Parliament in the ordinary legislative procedure in July. We have progressed then with the adoption of the work programme that was adopted in comitology procedures and after consultation with the member states in the Council in October 2023. The call for proposals was issued at the same time. The proposals were submitted and selected and the award of the funding will be signed in June, so nothing has been spent yet. It is all similarly controlled in the urgency procedure of the SCC, but even with the urgency procedure, it takes a year before we sign the contracts and choose the correct companies that would fit within the framework of this specific law, which was clearly to support the industry.
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