It's easy to be snide about the European Parliament. Easy to dismiss it as a talking shop, typified by the kind of self-regarding johnny foreigner who wears his coat over his shoulder en route from the Caprice des Dieux, (or "whim of the Gods") as the Brussels Parliament building is disparagingly known locally, to the poules de luxe on the Avenue Louise.
That's the kind of copy a certain type of British journalist churns out in his sleep for certain Europhobe newspapers, but it's hardly sensible.
The European Parliament (EP) is something more than a talking shop now and only a fool would ignore its increasing power and influence over our daily lives. Like it or not, an institution which now enjoys powers of "co-decision" over almost 40 areas, including the free movement of citizens, transport policy and regional subsidies, has to be taken seriously. MEPs still do not have the power to initiate legislation but their approval will have to be actively sought. Their trump card is the EU budget. That cannot be agreed unless they want it agreed.
MEPs place enormous emphasis on their status as the only EU institution elected by the citizens. They see themselves as the watchdogs in Europe, not only as the checks and balances against far reaching decisions taken by the Council of Ministers and the European Commission - decisions which at one time were taken behind closed doors with barely a nod to Parliament - but as ethical monitors of the vast, non-elected Brussels bureaucracy and its powerful executives.
The question of who monitors the MEPs is for the citizenry to ponder. The most recent Eurobarometer poll (taken last autumn), suggests a serene indifference among citizens and media. Only 32 per cent of the Irish respondents said that they had recently read, seen or heard anything in the media about the EP, a level of apathy comparable only to the UK at the bottom of the heap. A National Youth Council poll suggests that nearly half of the eligible Irish voters under 25 won't bother to vote in the June elections (compared to 61 per cent for all EU voters under 25). Yet 62 per cent of Irish people believe the EP plays an important role in the life of the EU and 75 per cent of us had notions of voting when polled last autumn.
Our 15 MEPS, among a 626-strong membership and representing under 1 per cent of the Union's 370 million citizens, must work hard to make their presence felt. In Brussels, the general impression - confirmed by their prominence in political groups and committees - is that they do succeed in making a mark disproportionate to their number. Nine are office-holders in the Parliament, including Gerry Collins who is a Parliament Vice-President and Pat Cox, who - though elected as an Independent and the sole Irish member of the European Liberal group - managed to become the group's president.
How to assess individuals is another matter. In terms of work-rate and media scrutiny, Cox uses the university-versus-secondary school analogy. If you take it easy in the Dail (secondary school) and neglect your homework, close media monitoring will probably ensure that mother (i.e. the voters) gets a note home. In Brussels (the university for these purposes), the system "doesn't give a damn", he says. Spend your days sleeping off hangovers and no note will be sent home to mother. "You could be a first-class honours student or a C-minus," says Cox, but how many outsiders are savvy enough to tell?
TO anyone attempting to assess an MEP's work-rate, the system has ways of making it painful. One tried and trusted method is to look at attendance figures at plenary sessions and committees. But astonishingly, although the EU is highly computerised in other ways, no computer search will yield this simple count. The researcher has no choice therefore but to plough through every single eye-watering list of every single name of every single MEP who voted on every single day of every single session to see who was present.
The upshot of this tedious, time-consuming exercise is that there is no scandal. Irish MEP attendance rates rank at the top end of the EU states. (For the record, the top attenders were Luxembourg, German and Belgium - who happen to live closest. At bottom was Italy, according to the Italian daily, La Repubblica, followed by Denmark and France).
In any event, in the eyes of the cynics, the only thing these figures attest to is that the signatory was physically present at some stage in 12 hours and staked a claim to the famous £185 daily attendance allowance.
"So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't," shrugs Nuala Ahern. Brian Crowley's place at the bottom of the plenary attendance list (some 94 absences out of 330 in the five years to March) partly reflects the fact that he always returns home on a Thursday whereas Alan Gillis' extraordinary record at the top (with less than 25 absences) reflects the fact he is nearly always present on a Friday.
Even contribution to debates is no sure-fire guide. Because the "heavy" debates usually take place mid-week, a one-minute contribution to one of these is more savagely fought for and considered more significant than seven minutes on a Monday or a Friday. Similarly, although the number of questions or motions for resolution entered in the name of an individual or group (the computer system, interestingly, throws up counts like confetti in these cases) can seem mighty impressive in total, it isn't always so. Within some groups, the practice of putting in a minimum number of questions on a rotational basis is not unknown. Indeed, it's been known for the odd MEP to be blithely unaware of a question entered in his or her name.
The same applies to motions for resolution. It has been known for a group official who gets the query from a lobby group, say, to enter it as a motion for resolution and to stitch an MEP's name to it simply because he happens to be the group spokesman on that particular topic.
On the other hand, the same procedures can just as easily throw up evidence of hard-working, dogged MEPs nibbling away in an impressive, focused way on a local or national issue.
The real work of Parliament happens in the 20 committees and the MEP who learns to use the system has a real chance of influencing EU law. Each Irish MEP is attached to at least two of the committees, either as a full or a substitute member. Mary Banotti and Pat the Cope Gallagher are full members of three. As in any forum, a member can as well spend the time sleeping off a hangover as influencing events by listening, contributing, cajoling and winning the right to draw up a particular report (become rapporteur) on a Commission proposal. And thereafter to spend long months, sometimes years, shepherding that report through its many complex constituent parts involving tax and legal experts, lobby groups, inevitable political hurdles and amendment stages before getting it accepted by Parliament - or not.
Pat Cox, having shepherded his energy tax report through Parliament in April, confirms with a big grin, that "when you pull it off, you're a contented man". Liam Hyland, on the other hand, cites one of his great disappointments as the Commission's resistance to his report pushing for the development of the potentially valuable wool sector. Though it made it all the way through Parliament, the case for research funding slipped at a typically EU bureaucratic hurdle which designated wool as a commercial rather than an agricultural product.
Though it's possible for MEPs on the lazy side to have the committee secretariat do the donkey work on a report and stick their names on the cover, where an MEP is committed to his goal the role of rapporteur can be a roller-coaster ride of enthusiasm, disappointment, pride and achievement. In terms of achievement, it is the one they often return to in conversation.
Still, for all the tricks of the trade, says one long-time Parliament official, "it's not easy being an MEP. It's not easy to take it easy any more". It is reckoned that hundreds of meetings take place in a day - committee meetings, political group and inter-group meetings, College of Quaestor and Bureau meetings, visiting delegations and lobby groups, scheduled visits by ordinary citizens as well as by les groupes sauvages (as one official calls the unscheduled visitors who drop down from the mountains for a look) . . . The Leinster MEP, Jim Fitzsimons, reckons the workload has increased 100 per cent in recent years. Many MEPs talk about working a seven-day week. All talk about the lack of recognition for this and their achievements.
As to the raison d'etre for it all, no Irish MEP cites the kind of historic European overview given to the Observer by Tom Spencer, the British MEP and passionate European (he was forced to resign recently after a sex scandal). "My father was in the war, at Anzio," he explained. "Once, on a family holiday in France, we stopped at a war cemetery and my father said to us: `I don't know what you have to do to stop this happening again but whatever it is, do it'."
Nonetheless, some Irish MEPs clearly do have a panoramic European vision. Others seem to see themselves as supra-national messenger boys, tied to the constituency by the system. Discussion during elections still centres on domestic political concerns. Bernie Malone's note-paper trails the legend: "For a Fair Deal for Dublin". Mark Killilea declared recently that "Europe was never a place of power", that people like Pat Cox and Bernie Malone "would be better off concentrating on doing more for Ireland". So if Pat The Cope Gallagher's constituents still see him as a county councillor, whose fault is that? Now that the toxic issue of expenses is at least part way to being dealt with, perhaps the time is ripe for the real debate.
