Mr. Francis Jacobs:

Deputies have asked very good questions and many of them are linked, so I will try to link them together. The Chairman asked the simplest question on the Danish Parliament.

I was referring to the Folketing visitors centre. I do not know when they set it up but all school groups who come to the Danish Parliament come here to learn how the Danish Parliamentary system works, with simulations and so on. They also started to explain the structure of the European Union.

Most questions on the European Union are to the Danish Parliament's own special centre, but I can check with my Danish counterpart and pass on the information. One advantage of my job is that we are part of a network of counterparts in all the member states. I would be very happy to provide more information on that matter.

The contributions are very important. I have always felt - I do not know how the committee feels about it - that subsidiarity can be very important in blocking some inappropriate proposals, but it is a legal concept and is difficult to interpret. It is very difficult to get the necessary number of member states. Often, the more practical approach is to express a national parliament's views on a specific issue - in a sense, to be almost a lobbyist within the process. At the moment the contributions of national parliaments come through the European Parliament's service for relations with national parliaments, which sends them on to the specific committees, but I see scope for closer links, especially between the sectoral committees within the Irish system and within other systems which now have a greater role on European matters. The Chairmanmentioned the attendance of national parliamentarians at committees. That has happened in some Parliament committees in the past. When I was on the constitutional committee there was a standing invitation for national parliamentarians who attended the committee. However, it is more important to meet in an informal way and try to get specific Irish and other national concerns into the process. An issue on which there has been some discussion, although it has not yet been developed, is video linking. I know the Irish MEPs have mentioned it when they appeared before the committee. They were very happy when the meetings were moved to Thursday because there was a chance of their being able to attend. Generally speaking, the European Parliament calendar and the Irish Parliament's calendar do not mesh. One way of dealing with the issue in a practical way is to have a video link, whether with Irish MEPs or with a rapporteur of the European Parliament who may be dealing with an important subject of interest to the committee or one of the other sectoral committees. The Parliament's committees are equipped for that possibility. It is possible that somebody could make a ten-minute presentation and be questioned directly by the committee. It is a practical way of getting a closer exchange.

The Chairman's third question was about what we are doing to publicise the elections. Obviously we are a very small office. The main way we can do that is through working with Irish NGOs, the European movement, the National Women's Council, the youth networks and so on. In the next few months I will be meeting with as many groups as I can to see how they are going to publicise the European elections. The National Women's Council and groups such as the 5050 Group are trying to promote greater participation by female candidates. Obviously we will be talking to them to see what we can do. The most practical way we can do it is to work with other organisations.

Deputy Joe O'Reilly mentioned the loss of one seat for Ireland in the European Parliament, which was finally voted on by the Parliament last week. It was a very difficult process because the Lisbon treaty provided for a ceiling of 751 Members of the European Parliament. When Croatia became a member without a further treaty change, a number of seats needed to found for it. The constitutional committee considered the issue and decided that no country should lose more than one seat. As a result, 11 countries have lost seats, including Ireland. It was passed last week by a very large majority, but the vast majority of Irish Members voted against it. There is one important clause in the resolution that was passed - that is, that before the next European elections, the Parliament, which has the right of initiative on its own size - normally it is the Commission, but in this case it is the Parliament - will return to this issue and examine whether it is fair from the bigger to the smaller states. Certainly the Irish Members argued that it is not fair that after the next election the 11 Irish MEPs will be representing more voters than the Danish, Finish and Slovak members, which are the next countries that are not losing seats. The principle of digressive proportionality, which sounds horrible, is a mathematical formula. All it means is that the bigger a member state, the more individuals MEPs are supposed to represent, from a maximum of 96 for Germany down to the minimum of six for Luxembourg, Malta and others.