Our Commissioner designate, David Byrne, sailed through the ratification hearings at the European Parliament in Brussels last week. Next week he and his new colleagues will be voted into office at the plenary session of the Parliament in Strasbourg, and on Friday he will be sworn in as Ireland's Commissioner before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. President Romano Prodi's new commission will hold its first formal meeting in Luxembourg the next morning.
In the meantime, Byrne is putting the final touches to his cabinet and there is still one vacancy in the six-strong team. Joining the chef, Martin Power (who came from within the Commission), are non-Eurocrat Martin Territt, former press officer at the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment (who recently moved to Brussels when his wife took a job there), Michael Scannell from outgoing Commissioner Padraig Flynn's cabinet, Verinoque Arnault and Angela Vardenhewer. This makes our new man's cabinet both gender- and nationality-balanced.
Deputy chef Arnault started as a French diplomat but has been with the Commission's foreign policy division for some years. Vardenhewer is a German lawyer formerly attached to the legal services, Amsterdam Treaty and Competition directorate divisions. Areas of responsibility within the cabinet have yet to be allocated, but Byrne and his team are now in their new offices with their own civil service on Brussels' Rue Belliard. The dictat of the new clean regime means abandoning the ivory tower which housed all commissioners together. His first priority is food safety and our new Commissioner will soon be producing a white paper detailing new legislative measures to prevent the whole of Europe being poisoned in the next scare.