Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Ms Costello to the House. We are living in very different times. I can remember a time when people used to speak about going over to Europe. Here we have a member of the European Parliament appearing before the Seanad. I hope the other House will take a leaf out of our book. It is good to see that greater engagement with the European Parliament. My question is somewhat philosophical. I agree that we need to move more rapidly towards a social Europe. That is important for a number of reasons, not least in terms of the overall competitiveness of the European Union. There are a number of welfare models within the European Union. There is the social democratic model in northern Europe, the residual model in Ireland and the UK, the southern European model in southern European countries and there is an even more different model of social welfare and overall welfare provision in the eastern European countries. If we move towards a more cohesive social Europe, will the European Union work towards a baseline of social supports along the lines of the front end engineering design, FEED, project in which Ms Costello is engaged, which is very much about support for the most needy in society, or is there scope in the context of environmental policy to move towards more consistency of supports between European nations? That is important in the context of overall competitiveness because, like environmental policy, if one country offers only minimal supports and others offer more gilt-edged supports it does have an impact on the type of economy that emerges on the other side.