Déirdre de Búrca (Green Party)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and I welcome the opportunity to engage in the Second Stage debate on the European Union Bill. The purpose of the Bill is to give domestic effect to the provisions of the Lisbon treaty. Before I refer to the provisions of the Bill I welcome the very strong and decisive vote in favour of the treaty cast by the people on 2 October. I congratulate the Minister, his colleagues and everyone else involved in the campaign to have the treaty ratified.

One reason the people voted in such large numbers in favour of the treaty was because they see Ireland's economic future as bound up with our continued membership of the European Union. They are very aware of the critical role the European Central Bank is playing in keeping our banks afloat. There are also expectations concerning the role of the European Union in helping us to tackle other deep-seated economic problems, including the growing level of unemployment. In the coming years this will be a major issue for the public. I hope there is a good deal of fresh thinking within the Council of Ministers and other European institutions regarding a co-ordinated European effort to try to stimulate economic activity and the accompanying employment or job creation opportunities. If there is no such attempt and if individual member states simply look after their own populations, real opportunity for economies of scale in terms of large infrastructure projects will be missed.

In addition, we must pursue the stimulation of more economic activity through the full implementation of the services directive. The directive may help many environmental companies which wish to deliver services in other member states to do so. However, the framework must be in place for European-wide co-operation in the emerging area of economic opportunity, that is, the green economy. If this is to take place we must consider common training standards for green collar jobs and common accreditation systems and we must ensure the services directive is fully and effectively rolled out. We must ensure also that infrastructural projects are undertaken. We need a co-ordinated European approach. We require a stimulus package that is genuinely European rather than each member state putting in its own funding into the pot and reserving it for its own population. Major benefits could be derived from that and I hope the Minister of State will carry this issue forward and raise it at the Council of Ministers.

The incorporation of the Lisbon treaty provisions into domestic legislation is a formality but, as others have mentioned, a number of issues are worth highlighting. The key provision in the Bill is the update of the European Communities Act 1972 for a number of reasons. First, the Union will have legal personality. In other words, it will be a subject of international law following the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, which means this part of the European Communities Act needs to be updated. Once the legislation is adopted, laws made by the Union, which has effectively been founded anew by the Lisbon treaty, will have the same force and effect as those made by the Union, as established and altered by the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice treaties and so on.

The exception relating to the European Court of Justice is included in the legislation. Section 2 gives the laws of the EU pre-eminence over domestic law. A great deal of misinformation was put out about this during the Lisbon treaty campaign. That has been the position in all previous treaties and this means the European Court of Justice will have authority to make final determinations in disputes between member states and the rights to make final interpretations of EU law, to review the legality of EU law or any measures taken by a European body and to rule on the adequacy of the member states' transpositions of EU measures into domestic law. Ireland has felt the impact of this on a number of occasions. The treaty states the court will not have jurisdiction with respect to the provisions of the Common Foreign and Security Policy or acts adopted on the basis of provisions and the Bill reiterates that exclusion.

The issue of Oireachtas oversight is important. Section 7 provides that the Houses of the Oireachtas can exercise oversight over the changes proposed in the Lisbon treaty to legislative procedures, which are complicated by the ordinary procedure, the simplified procedure and the passerelle clause, to which Sinn Féin referred frequently during the referendum campaign. The Houses of the Oireachtas has a role in blocking these changes if they do not believe they are in the country's interest.