ANALYSIS:The voting record of Ireland's sitting MEPs on a number of recent controversies provides important information, writes JAMIE SMYTH
ALMOST ALL Irish MEPs voted for an amendment to a report this year which – according to critics – ensures their expenses claims will remain shrouded in secrecy.
But they were divided over a report on rendition flights, which criticised the Government for failing to prevent CIA flights landing at Shannon airport.
These are the findings of an analysis of MEP voting records on five controversial issues decided during the European parliament’s current five year term.
The analysis shows 11 out of the 13 sitting Irish MEPs voted in favour of a controversial amendment to the Cashman report, which proposes to provide the public with access to all EU documents. In March this year the centre-right politician Hartmut Nassauer proposed amendment 115 to ensure that any decision to publish documents belonging to MEPs took due account of the protection of the political activity and independence provided under the existing members’ statute. This states that “personal files and accounts” of MEPs shall not be accessible to others, therefore barring their publication.
The Eurosceptic think tank Open Europe has strongly criticised MEPs, who backed the amendment as acting against transparency and accountability.
“No matter how MEPs present it, this amendment is a way to keep their expense receipts secret. It will prevent people from using the Cashman provisions to ask about expenses,” said Open Europe’s Mats Persson.
A spokeswoman for Fine Gael’s five sitting MEPs said they supported amendment 115 because it related to data protection issues. “This was not to ensure expenses are not revealed. Amendment 115 was designed to support the principle that one MEP could not look at the accounts or personal files of another MEP. . . This is a simple data protection issue,” she added.
Munster MEP Kathy Sinnott, who has published details of her expenses on her website, said she voted for amendment 115 to ensure the rights of parliament staff to privacy of personal information. “Their right to data protection should be protected too,” she said.
But Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald, who voted for the amendment, says in hindsight this may have been a mistake. “We were persuaded (by people with impeccable credentials) that the personal data protection aspect of the amendment seemed sufficiently important to warrant a vote in favour. In retrospect, the interpretation of this amendment relates very much to financial transparency and a vote against would have been more consistent with all our other votes on transparency,” said McDonald.
Keeping tabs on how MEPs vote at the European Parliament is a difficult exercise due to the sheer number of votes (more than 6,000 in the last five years) and the sheer complexity in picking through the sometimes hundreds of amendments that accompany legislation.
But it can provide important information on what MEPs stand for and whether they should be re-elected.
“In the US, voting records have been a very important source of information for voters over the past 10-15 years while in Europe it is only very recently that researchers are providing tools to enable voters to scrutinise how MEPs vote,” says Sara Hageman, who co-founded the website votewatch.eu, which offers the public a user-friendly way to sift through MEPs’ voting records.
Irish MEPs tend to vote the same way on about two-thirds of all proposals, making them the fifth most cohesive group of MEPs from the 27 different EU states in the parliament. But one key example where they divided was over the controversial Fava report on rendition flights. The four Fianna Fáil MEPs voted against the report, which criticised the Government, while most other Irish MEPs backed it.
Another controversial vote that has been mentioned during the current campaign was on a Sinn Féin amendment to the Vigo/Corbett report on the Lisbon Treaty held shortly before Ireland’s first referendum. Proinsias De Rossa followed the majority of his Socialist colleagues and voted against the amendment, which stated that the European Parliament should respect the outcome of the referendum.
“I voted against the amendment because I felt it was an attempt to influence the referendum process,” said De Rossa, who points out that he voted in favour of a resolution in October last year to respect the outcome of the referendum while outlining it should be possible to meet the concerns of the Irish people.
The other votes referred to in the table (see above) show how Irish MEPs voted on the services directive, one of the most controversial pieces of legislation passed by the parliament, and the Cappato report on transparency.
Fine Gael MEPs said they voted against the Cappato report because they felt the Cashman report was a better report to boost transparency in the EU.