It will take many years for Ireland to recover its former status in the EU – if it can ever do so, writes GARRET FITZGERALD
I WANT first to comment this week on the issue of public service reform, as envisaged by the Croke Park Agreement. It was clearly absurd to expect that a Minister for Finance who had to be deeply engaged with the reduction of our enormous budget deficit and with the resolution of our intractable banking problem would also be able to give to public service reform the kind of detailed attention, department by department, which only a designated minister for the public service could provide. Without such direct ministerial engagement, progress with public service reform was bound to be very slow.
This should have been clear from the moment the Croke Park deal was agreed eight months ago. Nothing in the record of the Civil Service, whose professional concern with dotting Is and crossing Ts is difficult to reconcile with speed in the implementation of policy decisions, could have led the Government to believe that, left to itself, that body would be able to carry through reforms rapidly, on a scale that would compensate for the large cost of the Croke Park deal.
That deal was initialled last April and was ratified in June. But during those two months no preparations seem to have been made for the negotiation of these reforms with the trade unions. And now, three months later, no progress has yet been reported in this crucial policy area – which, had it been tackled with appropriate urgency, might by end November have yielded savings that would have made it possible to avoid some of the meaner cuts in social welfare contained in Tuesday’s Budget.
This issue should never have been left to be tackled unaided by the Civil Service. An energetic minister for the public service should have been appointed in April to assist Brian Lenihan with the implementation of this aspect of his overloaded portfolio.
Next, turning to the European aspect of our affairs, there can equally be no excuse for the Government’s ham-fisted handling of the situation created by the European institution’s admittedly sudden decision that we must be helped by what has come to be called a bailout. The remarkably positive attitude that the Government is now adopting towards the assistance thus offered contrasts glaringly with its pointlessly misleading denials of any discussion of such a proposal when it first surfaced.
All this has had damaging consequences for our State. First of all it has quite unnecessarily impaired our own people’s perception of the European Union – and, equally, Europe’s perception of Ireland. Both of these perceptions had already been visibly destabilised by Fianna Fáil’s failure to campaign effectively for both the first Nice and first Lisbon referendums.
There is, I am afraid, little understanding among our people of the extent to which, since the 1990s, the reversal of the earlier positive Irish relationship with our EU partners has become a negative factor in both our foreign and domestic policy.
When, almost 40 years ago, we acceded to what was then the EEC, there was a clear danger that as a country precluded by its neutrality from contributing to European defence but also bound to draw more heavily than any other member state on EU funds, we risked being an unpopular entrant to the community.
To address this danger, from May 1973 onwards we adopted an integrationist policy which won approval from many of our partners. We also set about ensuring that our first presidency in 1975 would be innovative and would be seen to be successful.
This was subsequently reinforced by Charles Haughey’s decision to call two European Councils so as to help to push through German reunification, as well as by the steps taken during our 1984 presidency to clear the way for Spanish and Portuguese accession.
But in the early 1990s excessive demands for, and imprudent self-congratulation about, increased structural fund payments began to damage our image in Europe – at the very time when our growing prosperity was already starting to weaken sympathy for what had until then been the poorest state in northern Europe.
Despite two subsequent moments of diplomatic success – Dick Roche’s brilliant organisation of a 16-member small country group at the Brussels Convention which prepared the Lisbon Treaty, and Bertie Ahern’s successful negotiation of the final draft of the Lisbon Treaty, our political influence within the EU has been greatly diminished.
There are several reasons for this. First of all, until quite recently Fianna Fáil had no participation in any of the principal European political parties. This not only affected its MEPs’ role in the European Parliament, it also left it without involvement in very important pre-European Council party group meetings of participating Ministers. In this respect our Ministers have been at a clear disadvantage vis-a-vis Fine Gael, with its Christian Democrat linkages, and with Labour, which is in the Socialist Group.
Moreover, to put it delicately, some Fianna Fáil Ministers have tended to be more domestically engaged, and less personally involved with European issues. Anecdotally, some of them are said to be poor attenders at ministerial councils, and in this connection it may not be a coincidence that around the time when Fianna Fáil returned to office in 1997, details of attendances at all such meetings – which for more than a quarter of a century following our accession had been listed in reports published twice a year by the Department of Foreign Affairs – ceased to appear.
It will take many years for Ireland to recover its former status in EU affairs – if it
can ever do so. But one likely consequence of a change of government could be a greater and more constructive Irish government engagement with the institutions of the European Union.