Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail)
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I welcome Ms O'Connell and Mr. Richmond and thank them for their ongoing work. It is worth recognising the tremendous work they do on behalf of civil society. While there are several groupings in this area, the European Movement Ireland is the one we hear from the most and the one that carries out the most valuable work.

The accountability report deals with the quantitative aspect of attendance at Council meetings. Would future reports examine the agendas of these meetings and the input from Irish Ministers? Is there some methodology that could track the volumes of items raised and addressed by Irish Ministers and, subsequently, the outcomes? Using such a methodology would give a better representation of the quality of the work done by Irish Ministers. I am loath to use numeric data on attendance of Council meetings because there may be issues which do not relate to Ireland at a meeting.

I take the report's point about the Oireachtas committee system of EU scrutiny. A former Chairman of this committee, Deputy Durkan, and I have different views about the European affairs committee. I have always believed scrutiny should be pushed back to the sectoral committees. Deputy Durkan has always argued the opposite because sectoral committees do not always see the importance of the European agenda as they should. The report gives one example of this where Irish submissions on the future of EU taxation and customs policy came to 0.1% of the total made. It might be better if such issues were tracked by the relevant sectoral committee and that they accepted their role within the European legislative framework.

The work done by European Movement Ireland is excellent. My points are about improvement rather than criticism.