There was a shift in the balance of power at the European Parliament this week with Fianna Fáil centrally involved.
The Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN) grouping, which includes four Fianna Fáil MEPs, recruited 10 new members, seven from Poland and three from Italy. This brings its strength to 44 and means that it has moved ahead of the Greens to become the fourth-largest of the eight groupings in the parliament.
It is something of a coup for the UEN and Fianna Fáil MEP Brian Crowley who is joint-president of the UEN with Italian MEP Cristiana Muscardini. Groups with more than 41 members are entitled to a vice-presidency although this is considered unlikely to go to the Ireland South MEP.
The new UEN recruits have some interesting political baggage, however. Six of the seven formerly belonged to the League of Polish Families (LPR), a highly-conservative party which is currently a minority partner in the Polish government. The Italians are members of the Northern League, a party with a socially-conservative, Eurosceptic ideology.
But a Fianna Fáil spokesman in Strasbourg strongly rejected any suggestion that the new UEN members are on the far right.
The leader of the LPR, Maciej Giertych, last month sacked a researcher after she was filmed allegedly making the Nazi salute at a neo-Nazi gathering back home, but the spokesman pointed out that the new UEN members from Poland had split from Giertych and the LPR months ago and gone independent, before hook- ing up with Fianna Fáil and the UEN. Another element in the UEN grouping is the Alleanza Nazionale, which has roots in the Italian Social Movement, a neo-fascist party which was dissolved in 1995.
Fianna Fáil may be part of the rich and varied European tapestry these days but all politics is local and the old rivalry with Fine Gael surfaced in a dispute over the legal basis for EU funding of the International Fund for Ireland (IFI). The EU has been a generous contributor and this week Fine Gael MEP Senator Jim Higgins presented a report to the parliament allocating a further €60 million to the IFI over the period 2007-2010. No controversy there, but the difficulty arose over a vote by MEPs to change the legal basis of the report from Article 308 of the European Community Treaty, which only gives the parliament a consultative role, to Article 159, whereby the parliament has co-decision powers with the Council of Ministers.
This was based on the advice of the parliament's committee on legal affairs but it didn't go down at all well in Iveagh House, arousing anxieties that the IFI funding could be put at risk by a legal wrangle between the parliament and the council.
