Neale Richmond (Dublin Rathdown, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the Deputy's first point, three meetings have taken place on this since we last met, which was in Nemours on 10 January. There was an intention to have general agreement by the end of the Belgian Presidency. As to what will happen then and the impact on the EU's ordinary legislative process, I can only speak from experience and 15 years of working at a European Union level and everything that goes into it. We will have European elections on 7 June in this jurisdiction and across all member states on that weekend and, therefore, the parliament will have its first sitting in July. Committees will be allocated and the first substantive work will start in September. Member states will indicate their likely nominees to the new Commission in late June or early July. There will be hearings, which need to conclude by the middle of November. That is the very latest for the process to be done.

Regarding legislation, where there is a general agreement, obviously the Belgian Presidency will conclude in July and the Hungarian Presidency will then take over. That is the last of their Trio. They have already asked us for a bilateral meeting at the last EPSCO meeting. We were not able to fulfil that for wider political reasons, the details of which I do not need to get into in this Chamber. We will discuss that further with them.

The following Trio Presidency is when an Irish Presidency will take place in 2026. I would love to say I will be the Minister in that place and time but we all know that, whether we like it or not, there will be a general election in this jurisdiction before that. Perhaps either Deputy O'Reilly or I will be here to push it forward in some guise.

That is the rough outline of what we are looking at but we will see something put forward by the end of June, going into the next Presidency.

In terms of contact, I have had brief discussions and officials have engaged, more so with congress. I am happy to meet SIPTU directly in due course.

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