State of the Union

  • What the elections mean for Lisbon

    May 29, 2009 @ 4:16 pm | by Jamie

    Protests mark the end of the Celtic Tiger 

    I’m back in Ireland for a few days to get a view of how the European election campaign is going at home. An opinion poll commissioned by the European parliament this week forecast that turnout here at about 66 per cent would be higher than in any other EU state.

     This is hardly surprising given the country is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy due to the bursting of the property bubble (I note the Government is now asking the EU if it can pump a further 4 billion euro of taxpayers money into Anglo Irish bank) and jobs are being lost hand over fist in all sectors of the economy.

     Judging by our latest opinion poll today the public are angry and the Government is likely to be crushed in the local elections. Fianna Fail could potentially lose a seat in the European elections in Dublin where Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald is pushing Eoin Ryan hard for the third seat. Libertas’ Declan Ganley faces a tougher challenge in the
    North West constituency where Fianna Fail’s Pat the Cope Gallagher has a name and a strong local organisation. (see tomorrow’s Irish Times poll) 

     The fate of McDonald and Ganley in this election will be crucial in the upcoming referendum on the Lisbon treaty in the autumn. Ganley has already said if he is not elected he won’t lead a campaign against the treaty while Mary Lou’s impact in the no campaign would be seriously diminished if she can’t hold onto her seat. Several of my European colleagues (the correspondents from Le Figaro and the Economist) are currently in Ireland judging the mood of the public ahead of the elections for this exact reason. For their readership the European elections in Ireland are all about what the results say about the upcoming Lisbon referendum.

     Ironically, over here the public couldn’t care less about the fate of the Lisbon treaty during these elections- a point acknowledged at a press conference with Mary Lou McDonald, Joe Higgins and Patricia McKenna this morning.   

     Speaking to friends, colleagues and family at home it is clear that sentiment towards Lisbon has changed over the past few months because of the perilous state of the economy. But I think it is too early for yes campaigners to start counting their chickens ahead of the October vote. For one thing the economy is in such a bad state and sentiment towards the government is so poor that a Lisbon II referendum could become a referendum on the government. In other words, people may vote no to Lisbon simply to force Brian Cowen to stand down and prompt an election and a change of government.  

     Success for Mary Lou McDonald and Declan Ganley next week would bring this unlikely- but still possible- scenario a step closer.  

  • Will EU financial reform go up in smoke?

    May 27, 2009 @ 2:38 pm | by Jamie

    Things are certainly hotting up in Brussels these days.

    Today the European Commission headquarters has been evacuated for the second time in ten days. A hot water pipe burst spewing water into the lift shafts and the electrical systems. There was no fire this time around but commissioners, officials and journalists were forced to scramble out of the building just as commission president Jose Manuel Barroso proposed a radical reform of the EU’s financial system.

    As we all milled around outside one journalist joked the disturbance may have been a British plot to torpedo the new commission proposals to create a new pan-EU wide system for supervising the financial markets.

    The British government fears that a proposal to give a new European system of supervisors the power to overrule national regulators will prompt a eurosceptic backlash at home. The City of London is already up in arms over a separate proposal to establish a new EU system to closely regulate the activities of hedge funds. The prospect of a new EU regulatory authority telling its own Financial Services Authority what to do will send shivers down the spines of UK politicians.

    The proposals must be agreed by EU leaders and the European Parliament before they can come into effect. But Britain may find it difficult to block the reforms given the scale of the financial crisis unfolding in Europe and the obvious fact that national regulators failed so miserably to regulate their banks.

    There is clear logic in setting up pan-European regulation given that big European financial institutions operate on a cross border basis. In other words, if you have an internal market for financial services then you need to have a supervisor that can see what banks are doing in different states.

    At the press conference today McCreevy noted how one national supervisor told him that it first heard that a multinational bank based in the country was in financial trouble by reading press reports in the bank’s home member state.

    I presume he was talking about Dublin-based Depfa bank, a subsidiary of the German property investor Hypo Real Estate. The German taxpayer is footing the bill for Depfa’s largesse. The cost has reached €102 billion and is still rising.

    The commission’s proposals on financial reform are tapping into the “Never waste a crisis” philosophy articulated by Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. If it can’t be done now then it will be never be done, said Barroso.

    But given the importance of banks to national economies many EU states will be nervous about giving a new EU supervisor legally binding powers over their own regulators and by extension their banks. A huge political struggle lies ahead with the first round due to be slugged out at next month’s EU summit.

  • Pandering to the priests on Lisbon

    May 25, 2009 @ 8:30 am | by Jamie

     

    With all the talk about the European elections back home it’s easy to forget that a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty is less than five months away.

    But over here in Brussels the debate around Lisbon II is hotting up. Irish diplomats will today provide their EU partners with the first glimpse of the guarantees on Lisbon that they have been working on with the Council of Ministers senior legal eagle Jean-Claude Piris ever since the first no vote.

     The guarantees cover the areas of taxation, defence, abortion, religion and family life and are likely to be enshrined in the EU treaties via a protocol that will have to be ratified by all 27 EU states in the future (most likely when everyone ratifies the Croatian accession treaty in 2010 or 11).   

     The usual diplomatic cloak of secrecy has been spread over the exact wording of the guarantees. But diplomats that I have spoken to say they will be drawn up in a way that makes clear they are “Irish specific”. In other words when this Irish protocol is ratified it won’t give the European Court of Justice a pretext for using the Irish guarantees to make rulings in a British or French case. (For example a French firm couldn’t invoke the guarantee on Irish sovereignty over tax to argue against future European law in this area)

     Most foreign journalists and diplomats regard the guarantees as a price worth paying to assuage Irish paranoia about the EU. The idea that Europe is about to force Ireland to abort babies or go to war is complete nonsense- particularly since we’ve already persuaded Europe to honour our existing constitutional safeguards on both issues in the Maastricht and Nice treaties.

     My own fear about the guarantees is that they pander to a small band of religious conservatives and will paint Ireland in the rest of Europe’s eyes as some sort of intolerant, priest-led and parochial backwater. For example a guarantee underlining Ireland’s right to protect family life or education sounds innocuous enough. But in the hands of Coir, Youth Defence or other minority religious-led groups it becomes key ammunition in their fight against gay marriage, civil partnerships or non denominational schooling.  And by the way, where is the Government’s promised bill on civil partnerships?

    I also have a suspicion that no matter what guarantees the Government gave on ethical issues it would never be enough for an extreme religious minority, who do not represent the views of most Irish people.     

  • Fortress Europe is alive and well

    May 21, 2009 @ 8:28 am | by Jamie

     

    Getting tough on immigration is a major theme in this European election campaign as governments struggle with the economic downturn.  

    The British National Party is in with a real chance of picking up a couple of seats in England. Voters are poised to punish the established parties over the MP expenses fiasco and Nick Griffin’s BNP look set to win a seat in Europe for the first time.  

    In the Netherlands the far right politician Geert Wilders, who sports an extraordinary blonde buffon hairstyle and an apparent hatred of Muslims, leads the polls.  He was recently barred from entering Britain and is being prosecuted for inciting hatred and discrimination his party is in the ascendancy. 

     But it’s not just marginal parties that are advocating extreme policies targeting migrants. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has decided to spice up his party’s election campaign by breaking human rights laws regarding the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers.

    He has ordered the coast guard to return African migrants attempting to claim asylum in Italy to Libya without assessing their need for protection as required under international law. From 7th to 10th May some 500 migrants, including pregnant women and children, were forcibly returned to Libya- a state where they may face ill treatment or people traffickers.  

    The UN and the Vatican has condemned the Italian policy. But the EU, which regularly lectures others on human rights and boats about European values, has so far said little on the issue.  

     Berlusconi has had no such qualms, declaring he doesn’t want a multi-ethnic Italy. At a news conference this week with commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, he added that it was more humane to send migrants back to Libya than let them enter Italy because his government’s holding centres for migrants are like “concentration camps”. 

     “I think it is much easier … to examine individual situations in the country of origin, otherwise they come here and go to a camp which, I should not be saying this, is very similar to a concentration camp,” he said. 

    Fortress Europe is clearly alive and well and flourishing during this election.    

  • Libertas scores own goal in Poland

    May 18, 2009 @ 2:19 pm | by Jamie

     

    The Polish media have got wind of Libertas’ plan to stem the tide of Eastern Europeans coming to Ireland to work. The daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita carries a front page story on Libertas’ Caroline Simons’ suggestion that a new “blue card” (visa) system should be introduced to “reduce the burden to Ireland of caring for inhabitants of other member states”.

    Gazeta Wyborcza’s EU correspondent also notes on her blog that Ganley appears to have given up his “rather liberal (free-market I mean) economic outlook”. The policy won’t go down well in Poland where Libertas Poland is campaigning to remove the last remaining restrictions on freedom of movement of workers in Germany and Austria. The restrictions on working abroad (seven years is the maximum allowed under EU rules) introduced by many old member states when the ten new states joined the Union in 2004 has been a constant irritant for relations between old and new Europe. 

    The get tough on immigration policy peddled by Simons and her Libertas colleague Raymond O Malley bears all the hallmarks of Libertas spin doctor Lynton Crosbie, who helped John Howard win four Australian elections by raising fears about asylum seekers.

    Judging by the Irish Times poll last week, which showed Simons on 1 per cent, O’Malley on 3 per cent and Ganley on 9 per cent, Libertas have decided they must plumb the depths of populism to stand any chance of making an impact. But the contradictions in their platform are beginning to stack up.  

    Ganley says he is pro-European yet he cuddles up to the continent’s most prominent eurosceptics. He says he supports the EU’s internal market but then his Irish candidates say they want to stop freedom of movement. He calls on MEPs to publish their expenses yet drags his feet over saying how Libertas is funded.  

    This all begs the question: can we believe anything he says?

    PS Thanks to Mark for tipping me off that Libertas candidate Vladimir Zelezny will continue to stand in the European elections in the Czech Republic despite his conviction for tax evasion last week. He did tender his resignation but it was not accepted by the Libertas council, according to the Czech media.  

  • How much will a yes vote cost?

    May 15, 2009 @ 5:06 pm | by Jamie

    Bashing the Government looks like being the main theme of the upcoming Euro elections in Ireland but back in Brussels the eurocrats are fretting over the fate of the Lisbon treaty.

     So much so Information commissioner Margot Wallstrom is about to sign a €1.6 million contract with public relations company Edelman to sell “Europe” to the Irish people.

     Edelman, which has teamed up with Peter Brennan’s EPS Consulting, has beat off stiff competition from all the other big PR firms in Dublin for a plum contract during tough times.

    A formal contract signing is just days away enabling Europe’s PR blitz to begin in the early summer, possibly June.  

    So what can we expect over the next five months?

    Well as the commission office explained at the length when I broke the story of the tender in February this has absolutely nothing to do with the Lisbon treaty! Apparently, its just part of normal commission information activities to explain Europe to citizens.

    Call me a cynic but that sounds like claptrap. Or, more likely a legal disclaimer - in case no campaigners try to take a case claiming that the PR contract falls foul of tough laws on public money being used in referendum campaigns.

    The tender documents show the PR blitz will be aimed at the three groups who voted en masse against the Lisbon first time around: women; young people and low income families. More than half a million euro will be spent on cinema advertising- so if you are going to see a blockbuster this summer expect to see trendy adverts explaining why Europe is good for you. (Here’s one of the weirder variety below)  There will also be a big internet campaign to target the young with some sort of blogging initiative.   

     The Government, which recently closed down the Forum on Europe because it ‘cost too much’, also have a half a million euro tender out for much the same type of PR. Clearly, in the run up to Lisbon II the hard sell will replace more traditional debating chambers such as the Forum.  

  • So what do our MEPs get up to?

    May 14, 2009 @ 3:27 pm | by Jamie

     

    With just three weeks to go before the elections tempers are beginning to fray.

    I’ve spent the last three days arguing with a Sinn Fein press officer about Mary Lou McDonald’s attendance record. She had the worst attendance rate of all 13 Irish MEPs in the last parliament, according to a website votewatch.eu launched this week.    

    It said she attended 57 per cent of plenary sessions over the past five years while Fianna Fail’s Brian Crowley got top marks by attending 94 per cent of sessions.  Sinn Fein threw a wobbly at the statistics and forced Votewatch to take down her attendance record, arguing that the website did not take account of her six months maternity leave in 2006.  

    Fair enough. Everyone has the right to take time off work to have a child. Sinn Fein says that her real attendance figure is 73 per cent, however which still ranks Mary Lou well behind the second worst attendee Fianna Fail’s Eoin Ryan at 83 per cent. But just when I thought this row was dying down the parliament’s own website today finally decided to cough up the official statistics on all 785 MEPs attendance records. And you’ve guessed it, the parliament says Mary Lou’s attendance was 56 per cent! Although a note in the press release says the data does not take account of “justified leave”.   

    The truth is the parliament has been dragged kicking and screaming to providing attendance records in an easy accessible format for voters to scrutinise for fear of “naming and shaming” articles. But the launch this week of votewatch.eu, which uses official parliament statistics, forced its hand.

    Since this blog entry has mostly been about naming and shaming- Italian MEPs have the worst attendance record on any member states at an average of 71 per cent while Austrians are best in class at 92 per cent. See the full list here. 

    Over the next three weeks, if my temper doesn’t fray too much, I’ll endeavor to keep you posted on the campaign across Europe. Jamie 

Search State of the Union

 
Close
E-mail It