Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)

I apologise to the Taoiseach for not being present when he spoke but I heard his comments in reply to the questions on the monitor. I was at a meeting of the Joint Committee on European Affairs, at which we will be discussing, among other matters, a proposal for a Europe day in this Chamber on 10 May.

I want to address three points, some of which were touched upon. I support the Taoiseach's comments, which were made more forcefully in the Chamber, regarding reports in the news media on statements made by different national delegations. He indicated one could get knocked down in the rush of people running out to misinform journalists as to what they had said or not said at the Council meeting. It does not help the entire process or attempts to have transparency in the system if people, from whatever country and for whatever reason, make one point in the Chamber and make another while outside or, not having opened their mouths inside the Chamber, attempt to suggest outside that they fought the good fight and had been crucified on behalf of the nation.

This is part of an historic debate on democracy. There was a time when journalists were not allowed into democratic assemblies and it was forecast that civilisation, as it was then known, would be ultimately destroyed if they were allowed listen to our proceedings. We have some crazy relics of that past. A member of the public in the Visitors Gallery is not allowed to take notes. Anyone doing so will be told by one of the ushers not to do so. It is nonsense. The Department of the Taoiseach had an initiative to look at defunct legislation. Perhaps, the Acting Chairman might bring this matter to the attention of the Ceann Comhairle as the Committee on Procedure and Privileges would ultimately have the responsibility to remove that anomaly.

While I do not know how realistic this suggestion might be and I realise the constraints upon the Taoiseach, the draft constitutional treaty made proposals for the proceedings of the Council, when it meets as a legislature, to meet in public and be subject to the same media scrutiny as a national parliament. I suspect this might not be practicable for a meeting of Heads of Government, as those discussions are more like Cabinet discussions than legislative discussions. We should do anything that enhances the transparency of the process. Monday's edition of The Guardian refers to statements attributed to Germany and Austria from a session held in secret, which based on what the Taoiseach has said — he is a pretty good attentive hearer of such matters — was not what he heard. I put this down as a marker and pledge our support in whatever way we can give it. This sort of thing does not do the process any good and makes people more cynical than they already are on the matter.

I refer to the way the Lisbon Agenda and the Presidency conclusions have been reported. It would be preferable for all concerned if those conclusions could be more succinct. They contain much repetition and reference to the conclusions of the previous meeting. While I do not say that anybody in this room was responsible, as a document it is not the model of communication clarity that all of us would like. In so far as it addresses the Lisbon Agenda and the change since last year, five years after the original commencement at which point a national programme was thrust back on each country — we had a debate in this House last autumn on the national reform programmes — I am not sure we have got there yet. Perhaps the Minister for Foreign Affairs will respond when he gets the opportunity.

As I have said before in the Chamber, we need someone at European level in charge of the implementation of the Lisbon Agenda or co-ordinating national efforts even though the competences to achieve the Lisbon Agenda are largely vested in member states. In the Delors Commission, the British Commissioner, Lord Cockfield had specific responsibility to implement some 315 directives designed to remove the barriers towards the completion of the Internal Market. He drove that agenda at the time when the institutional nature of the Commission and Community was far less complex and smaller than it is now. While we need something equivalent, I do not believe a dedicated Commissioner would be a reality. On his election the President of the Commission, Mr. Barroso, said that he would make the matter a priority. However, it does not yet exist in a form that ordinary people can understand.

I am sure the Taoiseach and his colleagues are familiar with the Centre for European Reform in London. In one of its publications, it produces a Lisbon Agenda scorecard. It rates progress to date for the European Union as a whole as getting a "C". The hero or best performing country in the league is Denmark and the villain or bottom of the class is Poland. It covers the various sections of the Lisbon Agenda. In the area of innovation, under the two categories of information society, it rates the community and states that the heroes are Denmark, Estonia and Sweden, and the villains are the Czech Republic and Greece. On research and development, Finland, Slovenia and Sweden are top with Greece and Poland at the bottom of the league.

Ireland has nothing to fear from such a league table as in many cases we will do fairly well. Making such a league table available to a wider public would enable the normal political process to kick in in Greece or Ireland so that political pressure from citizens could be brought to bear on governments, departments or sectors of society that were not performing. It is not all down to Ministers. Certain whole sections of society need to pull up their bootstraps and get their act together in a way they are not doing. Given Ireland's relative success and its significant success, as Jean-Claude Trichet has said, in economic performance, and the particular diverse nature of different successful economic models, be they in Denmark or Ireland, we could embrace this and promote it.

Between now and next year, if the spring Council is to maintain its focus on the Lisbon Agenda, a better form of communicating progress in achieving its objectives must be found. I invite the Taoiseach and his colleagues to see if this can be done. I understand that some countries that are not performing so well would not want their behaviour or non-achievement to be published. It may be that, for example, the new Government in Germany might welcome external pressure. It might help the internal debate to focus on the need for change and reform. When this country, confronted with difficulties from the early 1980s, needed to make hard decisions, the external factors that brought us to make those decisions helped us to convince many reluctant component parts of our domestic constituency. I invite the Taoiseach to consider it as a possibility, otherwise I believe that the Lisbon Agenda and the spring Council as a formula will become very tired and will lose its way.

I very much welcome the focus on a common energy policy. As the conclusions state, in many areas we already have European-wide instruments that can enforce existing requirements. Deputy Kenny already made a passing reference to a failure to apply the rules of competition, which are already a fact of law, to the European energy market. The political resistance we have seen in some countries — the so-called economic nationalism — must be confronted. It can be confronted within the existing agreed regulatory framework. We are not talking about new provisions, departures or initiatives. We are talking about enforcing provisions that already exist.

The strategic outline of the European energy policy is first to secure supply. As the Taoiseach said in reply to questions earlier, the Russian bear could begin to selectively pick off individual countries. The only security we have would be to unite together as a purchaser. It is rather like small grocers coming together under the Super-Valu name and buying goods together to survive in an increasingly difficult marketplace. I commend the Council for having embarked on this area and wish it every success. I hope member states will show a degree of solidarity that will result in securing external supply.

Competition within the existing market needs to be reinforced and reinvigorated. In this regard, we need look no further than our regulator, which has in effect connived with the biggest electricity supplier to drive the one sustainable energy company out of the commercial market. I know the personalities involved as, no doubt, do the Taoiseach and others in the House. The Minister for Foreign Affairs has experience in this area from one of his previous departmental responsibilities. These are not simple issues and there are no simple responses. We have the ability to locate an airfield north of Arklow without causing any of the environmental problems or planning difficulties which have been encountered in the west of Ireland. That proposal has been brought to a standstill, however, as a result of difficulties concerning the ability of the supplier of sustainable energy to get into the grid.

When people contact 6,000 or 7,000 commercial customers to say "I am sorry, but we have to leave the market and we are getting out of it", they do not take such decisions lightly. There has to be some merit in the case that has been made by Airtricity. If it does not have merit, we should expose the accusations which have been made and the consequences of that. While we may be partly disconnected from the mainline electricity supply grid, we have a capacity for sustainable energy generation around the coast of Ireland. That capacity is denied to Belgium, for example, or even Luxembourg, to take a more extreme example.

While I welcome the EU's energy policy, we have to examine competition in this country in its current configuration under the legal framework that has passed into law. I invite the Minister to examine a proposal made by the Labour Party in respect of regulation in competition. We have suggested the establishment of a competition regulation commission, to replace the individual regulators in various sectors. There have been too many personality clashes between regulators and suppliers. Too many personal views have been expressed in such a small marketplace. We need to put in place a three-person commission that will benefit from shared research and a common analysis of economic statistics and components of the marketplace. That might be seen, generally speaking, as a more efficient way of making progress.

I will conclude by talking about sustainability in our energy supply. It might come as a surprise to the Taoiseach to learn that 50% of the energy that is consumed in this country is consumed by the construction industry and the housing and building stock it leaves behind. An elderly person living in Ireland, which has a temperate climate and benefits from the Gulf Stream, is statistically more likely to die from hypothermia resulting from poor insulation than his or her elderly cousin or sister-in-law living in Norway. We have an enormous need in terms of energy consumption. We will face problems caused by greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide emissions.

A report in one of today's newspapers states that Ireland will be charged €1 billion in fines as a consequence of its failure to meet the commitments to which it has signed up. We need to examine ways of reducing demand for energy as part of our overall examination of sustainability. The obvious areas in which demand can be reduced tend to be in the transport sector, in which the perceived high-profile consumers of energy are found. In reality, the construction sector, in its broadest sense, uses enormous amounts of energy. I invite the Minister to examine ways in which that can be addressed at national level.

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