Mr. Jim Higgins:

The man with the big shock of hair. When one is competing with local council issues and national issues, it is very hard to keep the international or European front on the radar.

From my own viewpoint, I am very lucky in that I have an excellent staff who pump out a huge volume of press statements almost on a daily basis. We regularly monitor the number of hits we get. Basically, the focus is the local media so, again, to come back to Tip O'Neill, all politics is local.

The Senator's suggestions in regard to Europe Day and the twinning of towns, which he applied in his own lord mayoralty of Cork, are excellent ideas. One of the issues he touched on concerns the envisaged reduction in the number of MEPs. As an Irish delegation, we sit down at the very start, whether we are from Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil or Labour, and we try to cover as many committees as possible, particularly those that are of vital importance to Ireland. We are not entitled to be on more than one committee as a full member, so I am a full member on the committee dealing with transport and tourism, for example, and Mr. Pat The Cope Gallagher is a full member on the fisheries committee, where he does a very good job. We try to spread the resources in that way. One can be a full member of one committee and a substitute member of another. As a substitute member, one does not have full voting rights and one can only attend if one asks to substitute for somebody else.

If we were to lose one of our MEP seats, our strength and representation at the committees, particularly the vital committees, would be further diminished. It is not looking good in that regard so, as a country, we need to look at this. I believe it is unfair by virtue of the fact the elections will probably be over this time next year yet we still do not know the configuration for those elections. Indeed, the local elections are happening and we still do not know what the new electoral boundaries will be. Subsequent to that announcement, we will then have an electoral committee which will look at the European scene. While that could be done overnight in terms of just assessing the population of the different countries, different constituencies and so on, we need to know this as a matter of urgency.

Senator Jillian van Turnout referred to obesity. As she may be aware, I have been raising the issue of obesity regularly. I put very strongly to the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, that home economics should be compulsory right up to junior certificate.