The size and budget of the European Parliament is not excessive, writes Tony Kinsella
Today France celebrates the 219th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, conjuring up images of hundreds of political prisoners being liberated. As often, the reality is less glorious than the image. The Bastille housed a mere seven inmates on July 14th, 1789, including an insane 59-year-old Dubliner, James Whyte.
Images and mirrors are tricky, challenging things. Criticising the reflected image rather than the reality it portrays may be comforting, but is a poor basis for rational thought.
This shaky foundation undermines many of the wonderfully constructed arguments Michael Parsons advanced in support of his call for the abolition of the European Parliament last Monday. He criticised the size and cost of the parliament, the disparate and confusing nature of its political groups, and the "dismally inconsequential role" most Irish MEPs played in the recent referendum campaign. This latter point, while valid, says more about them than the institution to which they belong.
The European Parliament is a unique democratic structure, its 785 members being directly elected by over 492 million citizens from 27 countries. That averages out at 627,000 citizens per representative which is roughly comparable to the US House of Representatives (660,000). The ratio in Germany is 134,000, 94,000 in the UK, and 26,000 in Ireland. It is therefore difficult to conclude that the parliament is too big.
Some 6,000 permanent staff seems a reasonable enough figure given that, for example, the local authorities in Michael's native Kilkenny employ about 700 to service a population of 110,000.
Democracy is slow, frequently cumbersome, and therefore expensive, and all the better for it. Dictators can take, and enforce, instant decisions, democrats must consider, reflect, discuss and usually compromise.
Translation and interpretation costs account for a significant percentage of the parliament's operating budget. The parliament works in 23 official languages, which means some 506 possible interpretation combinations. While it is reasonable to set linguistic qualifications (mother tongue plus at least one major language) for employees, similar criteria cannot be applied to the peoples' representatives.
Bulgarian electors must be free to elect whomsoever they deem fit, irrespective of whether the candidate in question speaks any language other than Bulgarian. Once a member has been elected, he or she must be able to express themselves in their mother tongue. This is the democratic reality of our Europe, an expensive, unavoidable, yet laudable, one. On balance the budget of €1.32 billion does not seem excessive.
Apart from its international polyglot composition, the European Parliament differs from most other parliaments (though not the US House or the Swiss National Council) in that it does not elect the executive, or government, in this case the European Commission, from among its majority.
The parliament works on the mainland European rather than the British model, meaning most of its work is carried out in committees with full plenary sessions usually approving committee agreements.
The composition of most parliament bodies is determined by the relative weight of its political groups.
The two biggest are the centre-right EPP with 288 members (including Fine Gael), and the centre-left PES with 278 members (including Labour) which account for more than 70 per cent of the members, broadly reflecting political realities in Europe.
Fianna Fáil and Silvio Berlusconi's Popolo della Libertà would both be quite at home in the EPP but cannot join for domestic reasons.
Were Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to admit in Europe that little distinguishes them, their electoral pitch back home would become even tougher. Silvio goes to great pains to claim he is not the successor to the Christian Democrats who governed Italy for most of the last 60 years - precisely because he is.
It is hardly surprising that these two parties form the backbone of the UEN group in the European Parliament. These plus the Liberals (Marian Harkin), the Greens, the EUL-NGL ex-communist group (Sinn Féin) and the 22 Eurosceptics (Kathy Sinnott) complete a parliamentary landscape lacking an overall majority.
Each vote, each agreement, involves finding a working compromise. As the political groups are far less homogenous than national parties, every majority involves its own cocktail of interests.
The parliament provides the most public and most accessible element in EU decision-making. This probably explains the legion of representatives that follows its work, draft submissions, and seeks to convince MEPs of the merits of whatever case they are arguing.
Large corporations, employer and trade union federations, local authorities, NGOs, academics, professional lobbyists, and local groups from the Arctic to the Mediterranean regularly pound the parliamentary corridors in Brussels and Strasbourg in pursuit of their interests.
Political power in the EU lies with the 27 national ministers, but the relative weight of the parliament has been steadily increasing since it was first directly elected in 1979. Twenty-nine years may be a long time in an individual's life, but is little more than the blink of an eye for countries, never mind a continent.
Voters, political parties, the media, and national governments have yet to fully integrate the European Parliament into their thinking, but are slowly getting there. The coming generation of political leaders has largely been forged in Europe.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt (32), the leader of the Danish Social Democrats, and Nick Clegg (31) leader of the British Liberal Democrats, are both former MEPs. Joseph Muscat (34), leader of the Malta Labour Party, is currently an MEP. Thorning-Schmidt and Muscat are widely tipped as future prime ministers.
The fact that the European Parliament is sometimes confusing, occasionally contradictory, and frequently boring, merely testifies to how accurately it mirrors our disparate realities.
Changing those realities is more effective, and significantly more challenging than abolishing the mirror in which they are reflected.
Blaming the mirror is pointless."Democracy is slow, often cumbersome, and therefore expensive, and all the better for it