Dara Murphy (Cork North Central, Fine Gael)
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I commend Dr. Barrett on his extraordinary piece of work. Some of the speakers referred to suggestions and recommendations. To be fair to Dr. Barrett, he has put a lot of issues forward for discussion. I refer to the ten suggestions at the end. I did not find them in the text but I jotted them down. The recommendations in No. 6 could fill the Chairman's work programme without difficulty for the next two and a half to three years. I suggest that we examine some of the suggestions as this is only a preliminary meeting. This is a report about the Oireachtas so it is about ourselves.

Dr. Barrett has listed ten recommendations. The report in its entirety is too vast to read in full. Dr. Barrett addresses issues which every parliament in Europe is wrestling with, some more successfully than others. If we were to take a starting point, should we refer to Denmark, Finland or Sweden? Which one would Dr. Barrett recommend that we engage with immediately?

On the issue of subsidiarity, there has been some discussion about the Seanad. I think we should decide what we want to do first and then subsequently decide how we are going to do it, whether in committee or in the Seanad, or whatever. I refer to the issue of quantum of work. This Legislature is undergoing change in that legislation will come to committees before being drafted by the Departments. This will create significant work for committees and, given the resources available to them, I wonder how they will be able to compete with and mirror what whole Departments are doing. Should we engage in drafting legislation or should we engage with European legislation that has been formally proposed in Europe? It seems to me to be a stretch too far to try to do both at the beginning.

We send MEPs to Europe. What structure of formal engagement with our MEPs can be possible, given the separation of powers? MEPs attend our committee meetings very occasionally. I refer to recommendation No. 3, which is about combining decentralisation and centralisation - a bit of a contradiction. There is no conduit for councils to send a message to the Dáil. Equally, there is no conduit between our Parliament and the European Parliament. Our parties have MEPs and we will meet ours at the Fine Gael conference this weekend. However, I do not think this committee sends MEPs to Brussels with a sufficiently Irish message from us. I ask how this might be improved. Our councils do not send a message to the national Parliament because we have done away with the dual mandate. I have no doubt we will be speaking to Dr. Barrett at another meeting.