Commissioners set out pitch for allocation of EU funds

THE muffled opening shots have been fired in what is likely to turn into a full scale battle over the future of EU structural funds in the next millennium.

Reform of the system - with billions of pounds at stake - must take place according to the draft final report of a major conference on EU cohesion, which opened here yesterday.

The 1994-99 programme involves expenditure of £125 billion, roughly £4.5 billion of it in Ireland.

The Commissioners for Social Affairs, Regional Policy, and Agriculture, Mr Padraig Flynn, Ms Monika Wulf Mathies, and Mr Franz Fischler, each set out their pitch for funds for the post-1999 allocation in the coded diplomatic language of Eurospeak. But the message of each was clear - keep off my patch.

And yesterday IBEC also made a substantial submission to the Government on the need for deciding new priorities for EU spending in both the medium and longer term. It called for urgent increases in spending on transport, infrastructure and telecommunications in the context of the EU's mid term review of the 1994-1999 operational programme currently underway.

IBEC is also seeking additional measures to help small businesses, consumer foods, textiles, and the clothing sectors. In the longer term IBEC makes the case for a new national development plan to reconcile the need to meet the EMU convergence criteria while planning for the public expenditure commitments, both nationally and EU funded, for the projects and programmes that a growing economy will need.

Acknowledging the need for a radical reform of structural funding at the launch of the 1200 strong conference, Ms Wulf Mathies spoke of the need to "concentrate our assistance more both in geographical terms and according to the problem areas covered".

The priorities, the Commissioner said, should be in the areas of developing communications and networks and integrated regional strategies that took account of all the Union's support mechanisms so that they did not actually conflict. The draft conclusions cites the case of fishing policy which wants less boats fishing while industrial policy subsidises construction.

Ms Wulf Mathies also paid particular tribute to the Irish success in using the funds and gave her usual hint that the country might not, therefore, need them as much in future.

Mr Flynn made clear that he rejects a purely geographical focus to prioritisation. He spoke of the treaty objective of developing both economic and social cohesion and of the particular importance of money paid through the Social Fund which supported the development of human resources.

He is also understood to reject as divisive Ms Wulf Mathies's antipathy to the rural development programmes sought by Mr Fischler to sustain rural communities in the face of further likely changes to the Union's system of farm support. Mr Fischler argues that such programmes should be integrated into a reformed CAP, while she attacks CAP for subsidising large farmers.