Colm Burke (Fine Gael)

I thank the Minister of State for her response to issues raised by me and Senator Leyden. Given the volume of EU legislation that is coming through, one of the problems is that committees are under pressure. I am a member of the Joint Committee on Health and Children and many issues at a national level are confronting it. The one committee that is working effectively on EU changes is the Joint Committee on Communications, Natural Resources and Agriculture because of the big volume of funding coming from Europe for agriculture. There is a need to bring items that are being discussed at European level into the public arena in this country. Discussion in the Seanad would be a useful exercise, whereas it does not necessarily happen in committees. Putting matters in the public arena at an early stage shows that constructive proposals are coming from Europe.

I saw an appalling article in a newspaper in the past week. We have 12 MEPs but the article said we had 13. It did not get its figures right. It complained about the fact that MEPs are getting €225,000 to employ staff for research on work going through the Parliament and also to disseminate information to the approximately 1 million people each MEP represents. That is less than 20 cent per annum per head of population in each constituency, which is less than one eighth of the cost of one newspaper per day. That issue does not seem to be taken up by the media at all.