EU: Pat Cox is one year into his job as head of the European Parliament. He spoke to Denis Staunton about what has been done - and what needs to be done.
When Pat Cox marks his first year as President of the European Parliament next Wednesday, he will do so quietly, without any celebration.
In his rather bleak, 11th-floor office in Brussels this week, he is at pains not to appear to blow his own trumpet.
"I'll leave it to others to say what difference I've made, if I've made any," he says.
Mr Cox clearly believes, however, that he has made a big difference, and he is quick to highlight what he sees as the Parliament's achievements under his presidency.
The Munster MEP has certainly worked hard during the past year, visiting all the candidate countries at least once, forging relationships with the Russian duma and other parliaments and pushing for changes in the way the European Parliament does business.
He has improved the Parliament's relationship with the Commission, putting in place a new system of consultation between the two institutions. And he has won the admiration of EU leaders by taking a fresh approach to his meeting with them at the start of each EU summit.
In the middle of all this, Mr Cox came to Ireland for five weeks to campaign for a Yes vote in October's Nice Treaty referendum. He travelled throughout the State, working seven days a week and making dozens of speeches at public meetings.
"I worked during that five-week stretch as hard or harder as I would have done if I was trying to get re-elected to the House," he says.
Mr Cox believes the referendum result was crucial, not just for Ireland but for Europe as a whole, and that a No vote would almost certainly have delayed enlargement.
The enlargement negotiations were highly technical, focusing on the adoption by the candidate countries of thousands of pages of EU rules.
In the end, it was up to heads of government to agree the deal that was sealed in Copenhagen in December but Mr Cox maintains that his visits to parliaments in the candidate countries helped the process.
"I think that was a significant and useful political profile for a process that was necessarily detailed, dense and technocratic," he says.
IT was in Barcelona last March that EU leaders first realised that Mr Cox was determined to bring a new style to the role of President of the European Parliament.
At the start of each summit, the president meets the leaders for half an hour, an experience the leaders have traditionally seen as a dreary and irrelevant prelude to their real business.
Where his predecessors delivered a prepared text, which had usually been written so far in advance that translations were immediately available for journalists, Mr Cox spoke from notes written on the back of an envelope.
"I tried to focus on political issues rather than to give some kind of state-of-the-world address on behalf of the European Parliament," he says.
In Barcelona, Mr Cox told the leaders exactly what the Parliament had done, in concrete terms, to realise the EU's ambition to become a more competitive economy. The Spanish Prime Minister, Mr José Maria Aznar, and Britain's Mr Tony Blair led a chorus of praise for what Mr Blair described as "a remarkable statement".
Mr Cox has had less success in reforming the European Parliament itself - "the House" as he likes to call it - although he has tried to enliven its stilted debating format by introducing a system whereby deputies can "catch the eye" of the chairman to intervene. The political groups have resisted change and Mr Cox's lively new system is only available to MEPs once a month.
In December, MEPs voted against a plan to reform their pay and expenses but Mr Cox becomes snappish at the suggestion that the vote represented a defeat for him.
He says that the Parliament is still determined to reform, and hopes that agreement will be reached by the summer.
"If we don't sort it out by the end of the Greek presidency, it's unlikely to be resolved," he says.
MR Cox points out that any reform has to be agreed not only within the Parliament but with the Council of Ministers. But he shows a curious indifference to the damage being done to the Parliament's reputation by the slow pace of reform, complaining weakly of "populist" media reports that aim to "whip" Europe.
"If we went around in sackcloth and ashes and got paid nothing, there are some people who would still whip anyway. So frankly, I discount all of that and it's not my special concern."
He is concerned, however, about the Convention on the Future of Europe, and although he avoids direct criticism of the Government, he makes clear that he does not share the view that the convention's work can be undone in the inter-governmental conference that follows it.
"This is something very serious. It will be very influential and its moment of definition is coming now. You can save up one or two super-strategies to the very end, for the end bargaining, but you can't save up everything," he says.
Mr Cox shares the Government's opposition to tax harmonisation in the EU but he believes that the case for tax competition should be made positively rather than defensively.
He says that Ireland's experience of using a low tax regime to help in closing the development gap with the rest of Europe is one that many candidate countries would like to repeat.
"If they want to argue the case for the maintenance of the sovereign integrity of states to determine their own corporate tax rates, don't do it by saying, 'Hands off Ireland's taxes'. There's a dramatically more substantial case to be made," he says.
Mr Cox is dismissive of fears raised by the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, that federalists at the convention want to harmonise criminal law throughout the EU. He says that no such proposal has been made and points out that the mutual recognition of civil law proceedings has not undermined Ireland's common law tradition.
"We've got to avoid exaggeration for the sake of effect, even if the analysis seems to be powerful," he says.
He believes that many Irish people, including politicians, still regard Europe as something external, despite the fact that Ireland has been in the EU for 30 years.
He is hoping that, in speeches later this month, the Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs will outline a new vision of the place of contemporary Ireland in contemporary Europe.
"Bear in mind, we own this Europe. We're not very big but we own it as much as the French, the Germans or someone else. The idea that we are passive, isolate, marginal and are having things done unto us by this convention process misses the point and even misses the opportunity.
"It is our convention, it is our platform and it is our responsibility to develop the positive logic of any proposition we have," he says.