The only hitch on the packed Dublin-Brussels-Strasbourg route this morning is the 40 minute delay in Brussels. We finally get into Strasbourg at around 1.30 p.m. It could be worse. Considering the fabulous punctuality statistics peddled by the airlines, MEPs must be spectacularly unlucky. For them, late and cancelled flights are routine.
Patricia McKenna has long since surrendered to business-class airport lounges and the chauffeured cars supplied to deliver and collect MEPs from airports and hotels. She once considered them elitist. Not any more. Not with the odd hours they have to work and the time spent hanging around dreary airports.
"When I get on a plane, I'm going to the office," says John Cushnahan, "and it's a hell of a long way to go to the office." It is eight hours since this morning's 5.30 a.m. alarm call for those of us on the 6.55 a.m. out of Dublin. It feels like 28.
All afternoon, ashen-faced Irish MEPs, many of them - like Limerick MEP Cushnahan - straight off a 13-hour, three-flight marathon, trail in and out of the parliament chamber for the narcoleptic evening sessions (or seances as they are aptly called en francais). Then back down endless corridors to committee rooms or group meetings or soulless offices. These dens are about big enough to hold an extra chair the other side of a desk, a shelving unit, a television and the notorious sofa upon which some are reputed to spend the night to save expenses.
The sofa, disappointingly, is an alarmingly narrow divan that slides away under the shelving. The equally famous bathroom facilities are nothing more than a tiny washbasin, toilet and shower hardly big enough to accommodate a respectable middle-age spread.
The heart of this charming city is a short taxi ride away, but it's been a long day. Pat Cox is presenting his report on the taxation of energy products to Parliament at some god-awful hour near midnight, and there's an 8.15 a.m. meeting in the morning . . .
There's not much to laugh about in the energy-sapping, dead air of the old Council of Europe building but this is a start. This, then, is what 20 years of hype about jet-set lifestyles and luxurious perks was all about.
"Up to when the new offices opened in Brussels in September 1997, two of us had to work in an office this size, without air conditioning, and a window that opened on to a deafening six-lane highway so you couldn't make a phone call with the window open. It would have been condemned had it been a factory," says Mary Banotti. "But no journalist came to me then and said `sorry, I couldn't work in here', and reported that."
Mild and reasonable as this is, she immediately regrets it, terrified of being portrayed as a whinger. Like many politicians, she tends to preface anything remotely negative with a defensive, "I know we're very lucky, I don't want to be seen to be complaining . . . "
The trick then, is to look relentlessly grateful and authoritative while nursing a deep well of bitterness towards the media reptiles for long years of misrepresentation. Did you hear the one about the condom machines right outside their office doors?
For 20 years, Irish MEPs have been caught in a catch-22. Let one of them bring up a genuine grievance and the response would inevitably be: "But what about the perks, the travel, the expenses . . . ?" Now the MEPs are crying halt. Their tails are up after bringing the lofty Commissioners to heel. And to the doorsteps in their re-election campaign, they bring news of their brand new Members' Common Statute, heralding a new era for Parliament of that old chliched trio - openness, transparency and accountability, not to mention reimbursement for travel expenses actually incurred as opposed to the lump sums they once rejoiced in.
So all that stuff about travelling economy class and sleeping on the sofa (which the Parliament President has banned for security reasons and which only the Greeks and Portuguese got up to, anyway, naturellement), is history. Right? Up to a point.
Just say the word "expenses" to Alan Gillis and it's like flicking a switch. "I didn't invent the system," he retorts, reddening. "I know some of these journalists are on good schemes themselves . . . I have information about some of them and I'll start giving it out if this continues." Mark Killilea, retiring shortly (making him the happiest man alive, by his own account) speaks with injured innocence of "wild allegations, particularly in some of the national papers . . . That hurts me. The MEPs did not, could not, make the regulations for ourselves. We did not possess the legal powers until now." As for the stories about wives working as assistants, operating out of garages masquerading as offices, a thoroughly exasperated Pat Cox remarks: "Not one of those people who wrote those stories ever asked me for a quote or came to look at my office or my assistants to see if they existed and what they were like."
Our MEPs are mainly decent, hard-working people. They do important work under conditions that would drive most of us insane. Yet they do bear a heavy responsibility for allowing the issue of expenses to dog and taint their every move, their every achievement, allowing them to be characterised by some as little more than scroungers on the Euro gravy train. Pace Mr Killilea, they always had it within their power to address the thorniest of the image problems, i.e. the system under which travel expenses were reimbursed on the basis of mileage rather than the vouchable price of a used plane ticket.
They all admit there was "fat" or "surplus" in the travel end of the system but believe that at some point, in some way, it was justified. For example, air fares were far higher when the system was introduced, pre-deregulation. And then, the "fat", say many, was diverted in justifiable ways. Election campaigns costing up to £75,000 have to be saved for. Vast constituencies have to be traversed, nursing the vote, visiting schools. And Brussels, they claim, made no allowance for this. (Ireland is now the only country which doesn't operate the list system at elections, leaving the fight for Euro-votes largely personal).
A document from the parliament's paymaster, the College of Quaestors, however, does state that the "general expenditure" allowance, worth about £2,610 a month, was supposed to cover travel within the home state among other things. This is entirely separate from the "secretarial assistance allowance" of £7,526 a month, payable directly to the assistants since December 1995.
Several MEPs say they put "the difference between business and economy class" into contributions of various kinds; one calculates that he has donated some £3,000 in this way. Mary Banotti pays a lot of her own expenses in the course of her work on child abduction. The two Greens - Ahern and McKenna - surrender 20 per cent of their gross salary to the party, while Bernie Malone reckons she has handed some £75,000 over to Labour in four-and-a-half years.
But the main plank of the Irish defence has been the basic inequity in the system which set salaries on a par with each member's national parliament. Thus, Italian MEPs (the highest-paid in the 15 member states, though with the worst attendance records at votes and committees) were paid £93,000 a year for doing the same job as Spanish MEPs, who got £27,000 (the lowest). On that scale, Ireland comes in 11th in the 15, with salaries of £37,473 - which, like every other MEP's salary up to now and uniquely among EU institutions, was taxed at the national rate rather than the Community rate of around 21 per cent. The theory goes, therefore, that the generous expenses regime was a "clumsy" attempt to create an equalisation.