More resources must urgently be given to the Oireachtas European Affairs Committee if it is to successfully monitor EU issues, the National Forum on Europe has been told.
The complaints were aired during a Forum debate yesterday on the future role in the EU of national parliaments and the need to have decisions taken as close as possible to the people affected by them. Sharply critical of the resources on offer to the Oireachtas, Labour Party president Mr Proinsias De Rossa said the Government and the public should stop "trying to have democracy on the cheap".
The newly-established European Affairs Committee (EAC), under Fine Gael TD Mr Gay Mitchell, has less than a handful of staff to probe the 10,000 official EU documents produced annually.
He was supported by a number of members of the EAC, including Fianna Fáil TD Mr Pat Carey who also serves as an alternate member on the Convention on the Future of Europe.
Last week, many of the 100 draft EU documents due before the EAC's scrutiny sub-committee arrived just 24 hours beforehand: "We are expected to be conversant with the documents, with limited resources," he complained.
Another EAC member, Progressive Democrat Senator John Dardis said: "I don't see how we will be able to do this job without more resources. I am conscious that resources are limited, but it is going to be extremely difficult."
Labour TD Mr Brendan Howlin said the improved role for the Oireachtas in EU affairs is "meaningless" unless the Oireachtas committees are properly resourced.
He said he had served on an Oireachtas committee 20 years ago dealing with EU legislation: "Ministers swamped the committee with thousands of pieces of paper which we waded through until we were exhausted," he said.
The chairman of the National Forum on Europe, Senator Maurice Hayes, said he was prepared to emphasise to Government the need for more resources and secretarial back-up for the EAC.
A Convention on the Future of Europe paper has proposed that national parliaments should be able to block EU legislation if they believe particular decisions should be taken more locally.
Under this proposal, national parliaments would be able to appeal to the European Court of Justice, but only if they had first issued a "yellow card" when they first heard of the legislation.
German academic Dr Andreas Peter Maurer yesterday warned that the plan could simply give member-states outvoted at the Council of Ministers a second chance to stop legislation.
In future, the European Commission will have more than enough members to ensure that some of them spend their time explaining the EU's legislative plans to national parliaments, he told the Forum.
German Foreign Minister Mr Joschka Fischer's call for another EU institution, to be named the Congress of European Peoples, is not supported by the majority of the Bundestag, he reminded Irish politicians.
Such a Congress will not "bring Europe closer", he said, since its members would be sucked into "the Brussels machinery within months".
"You need to Europeanise national parliaments, not the other way around," he declared.
Welcoming Mr Maurer's remarks, the Green TD Mr Dan Boyle said Mr Fischer's "flights of fancy do not mean that he is speaking ex cathedra for all the Greens of Europe".
Equally opposed to a European Senate-style proposal, Fine Gael Dublin MEP Ms Mary Banotti said Irish members of the European Parliament should be "required" to appear before Oireachtas committees.
But she said: "The European Parliament doesn't like the idea of a bunch of national parliamentarians coming over telling us how to do our work, since it takes a long time to learn how to do our work."