Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

I congratulate Deputy Allen, Chairman of the Sub-Committee on EU Scrutiny, on all the work that has been done by the committee under his remit. The Third Annual Report on the Operation of the European Union (Scrutiny) Act 2002 is a most impressive document. It highlights the sub-committee's enormous workload, including the number of meetings during which documents were considered, issues which were decided on and discussions with various officials took place. Page 11 of the report gives a breakdown of the number of adopted measures, legislative proposals, directives, regulations, decisions, Green Papers, White Papers, Common Foreign and Security Policy measures, Title 4 measures and early warning notes which were considered by the sub-committee. Such a workload would be quite onerous for any committee. It is a particularly enormous workload for the staff who work on the sub-committee.

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