Dick Roche is the Minister for European Affairs and a member of Fianna Fail, the main Governing party in Ireland. In that capacity he is responsible for coordinating the European dimension of all of the Irish Government’s policy and legislative initiatives including the proposed second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
He has agreed to an interview next Tuesday which I hope to document on this blog. I am currently planning the interview and would like to enlist your help in coming up with some good questions - particularly from a European angle, or from the perspective of your own country.
Obviously much of the interview will be ad lib in response to how the conversation flows, but I would like to have a list of questions prepared in order to ensure I don’t miss the opportunity of asking a relevant question. So here are some of the questions I am thinking of asking. Please add some further suggestions in the comments!
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1. Minister, there is an old joke that the difference between Ireland and Iceland is one letter and about 6 months. In recent weeks we seem to have been making strenuous efforts to catch up with Iceland. The Irish Economy is expected to decline by 6% this year and next, unemployment is expected to rise to 17% next year, and with the current budget deficit is expected to come in at over 10% of GDP this year and next - over 3 times the Maastricht Growth and Stability Pact limit. How do you think this will impact on the European Elections in Ireland?
2. The recent Sunday Business Post Red C poll put Fianna Fail at 23% of the vote - a historic low - which compares to the 42% you received in the last general election in 2007. If that poll turns out to be accurate, Fianna Fail could be fighting for the last seat in each of Ireland’s 4 Euro constituencies. Do you think it is possible that Fianna Fail might lose a seat in one or more constituencies?
3. The fact that Sean O Neachtain, Fianna Fail sitting MEP in Ireland North West has withdrawn due to ill-health means that Declan Ganley of Libertas is now the only candidate based in Galway, the main city in the region. Given the tendency of people to cross party lines to support local candidates, do you think Ganley now has a realistic chance of being elected?
4. Fine Gael (the main opposition party) have nominated a very strong second candidate in Ireland South in Sean Kelly, a former high profile President of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Does that give Fine Gael a chance of a second seat in Ireland South or will the last seat go to Labour or the sitting Independent MEP Kathy Synnott?
5. Labour have nominated Nessa Childers, a daughter of a former Fianna Fail cabinet minister and President of Ireland, and also a former Green Party Councillor, for the Ireland East Constituency. Do you think her name recognition and association with both Fianna Fail and the Greens puts her in the ideal position to take the third and last seat there from Fine Gael?
6. There are 4 sitting MEPs in the Dublin Constituency which is being reduced to 3 seats for this election. This means at least one sitting MEP has to lose out, and the pundits seem to be predicting that the last seat could be between Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein. Wouldn’t it be extraordinarily embarrassing for Fianna Fail to lose to Sinn Fein and have no seat in the Nation’s Capital? Could such a defeat threaten Brian Cowen’s leadership of the Party?
7. Fine Gael and Labour, the two main opposition parties, make much of their membership of the two largest groups in the European parliament, the EPP and PES respectively, whereas Fianna Fail has been a member of the much more marginal UEN group and is talking about joining the liberal ALDE group. Does this not undermine Fianna Fail’s credibility as the leading Irish party in Europe particularly as Fine Gael got 5 seats to your 4 at the last election?
8. Is it not a little surprising, just when you are thinking of joining the Liberal ALDE group, that the Fianna Fail Minister for Justice should bring in an amendment to the Criminal Justice Act in which he proposes to bring in a new crime of Blasphemous Libel? Is this not bringing us back to the 1950’s, or the divisive referendum campaigns on Divorce and Abortion in the 1980’s? Some people (myself included) have suggested that Fianna Fail might be trying to distract attention from the economic situation, and that you tried a similar diversionary tactic ahead of the last European Elections when you proposed controversial reforms of immigration and asylum laws to shore up your conservative and nationalist base?
9. Many people deride the European parliament as a home for retired national politicians or people who couldn’t otherwise make it in national politics. What distinctive contribution did the Fianna Fail members of the last Parliament make, and how would you see them influencing policy and legislation in the next parliament? What are your main policy priorities in the EU? Why was their no EU Stimulus plan to tackle the global recession?
10. Lastly, a question on the Lisbon Treaty. I know it’s not directly an issue in this election, but a second referendum is widely expected to be held next October. Why do you think people who voted NO the last time around, or indeed didn’t vote at all, should vote YES this time around? What do you say to those who complain that Ireland is being bullied by the European Elite to keep voting until it produces the “right” answer?
Obviously the above questions have a strongly Irish focus. If you are interested in his views on Enlargement - on the accession of Turkey, Croatia, Serbia, or Iceland to name but 4 possible applicants, or on any other European topic, please let me know.
(7 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5)
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The questions are carefully crafted, but the answers are in the hands of the campaigning candidates and the Irish electors.
You can hardly get much more out of the answers than official optimism, tempered by shades of realism.
Why not conduct an interview on Europe?
Is there an Irish vision of the European Union beyond the Lisbon Treay?
Does enlargement require (further) EU reform, or is it to continue with no end in sight?
Should the future EU be financed through taxes? Should it have a budget with real impact? How should EU spending be reformed to promote the interests of EU citizens better in the future?
Should EU citizens be given power over the union, beyond an EP with limited powers?
Is Ireland comfortable with Sarkozy’s view of an EU of two or three big member states (through their heads of state or government) setting the pace for the EU?
Is it a positive development that the Commission has become weaker and more pliant, emphasisng the intergovernmental European Council and Council as the central institutionns (and their limitations in forging policies)?
Is a new term for Barroso a wise decision for Europe? Why?
Should there be a European regulator for financial institutions?
Should Europe act coherently on the international stage? How?
Is it justifiable for Ireland to effectively opt out of European defence (policy) aspirations?
Challenges for Europe with regard to climate change and energy; is the EU up to it?
Despite the economic crisis, how does Ireland see the future of EU spending with regard to much poorer member states? The meaning of solidarity?
What are the Irish Lisbon guarantees going to look like and how are they going to be made legally binding?
Is the government as complacent and as easily outmaneuvered during the second referendum campaign as during the first one?
Why should the Irish vote yes this time around?
TH!NK ABOUT IT - european blogging competition 2009 » Blog Archive » Planning an interview with Dick Roche
Very true, and some excellent suggestions for questions.
I think the sort of questions you envisage is the sort of interview I would ask after the immediate crises of this election and the Lisbon referendum have been passed.
Dick is a severely practical/pragmatic politician, and whilst he can do “the vision thing” he is going to be very much more focused on winning the election/referendum at the present time.
He is not going to want to raise additional issues such as Turkey accession, Sarkozy/Merkel domination of the EU, the Barroso coronation, further EU Treaties requiring referenda, EU defence policy, EU inaction on the financial crisis when all those issues have the potential to lose him votes and little upside at the present time.
He would probably “kick for touch” by saying the Lisbon Treaty meets foreseeable needs and yes, of course, Ireland is in favour of positive engagement with the EU and its continued development in the international sphere.
However I will do my best to work your questions into the conversation. Just because he will take a very incremental approach is no reason for me not to ask the questions!
Well, lack of vision is as revealing as an abundance of it, so think about it.
Hi, Frank
I started writing a response, but it mutated into an entire blog post: http://is.gd/zNdB
In terms of questions for Dick Roche, I favour a balance between European-wide and national issues.
Joe
Maybe “Do you think there should be an open competition between the EP Groups for the Commission Presidency?”
And (in addition to 9) “Are FF’s legislative priorities ELDR/ADLE’s priorities too?”
Or “What degree of autonomy will FF MEPs have of the FF executive and the ELDR? Will FF MEPs be working on and adopting common group policies (have they, for example, adopted the ELDR manifesto?)? Or is it simply a marriage of convenience?”
And “Do you agree with Labour that the next Commissioner should be selected by the Dáil?”
You’ve already got a lot of good questions there - how long will you have for the interview?
How about some purely European questions such as:
1) Institutional arrangement of the EU - United States of Europe or Europe of the Nations? Or maybe two-speed Europe?
2) Enlargement - how much and when? Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia? Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia?
“What degree of autonomy will FF MEPs have of the FF executive and the ELDR? Will FF MEPs be working on and adopting common group policies (have they, for example, adopted the ELDR manifesto?)? Or is it simply a marriage of convenience?”
I think this is an excellent question.
“Do you think there should be an open competition between the EP Groups for the Commission Presidency?”
And this is a nice way to approach the issue of a possible unchallenged bid for re-appointment by Barroso.
Hi Josef and Grahnlaw,
Many thanks for this well argued post (on your blog) and for the suggested questions. I think I was allowing my self to be too intimidated by the fact that I was likely to have only c. 30 minutes or so to ask the questions and that I could waste a lot of time on questions he really wasn’t going to answer.
We have an expression in Ireland “he could talk for Ireland” meaning that Dick Roche is a great talker and could easily spend 30 minutes talking about just one question. So I have to be pretty disciplined in the questions I ask if I want to get any sort of wide agenda covered..
However I will do my best! I will let him know that many of the questions have been submitted by European Bloggers and that their is a strong demand for greater discourse on longer term European issues as well as the shorter term national issues which tend to dominate local campaign coverage.
Cheers, Frank!
Phew - 30 minutes? That’s not long!
Certainly, don’t ignore the national issues, especially if you think those will lead to the most interesting answers.
But this is also an opportunity to talk about the EU in more general terms, and especially about issues that Roche and his fellow MEPs will be dealing with following the elections.
Give him a mix of questions - whatever you think will produce the most illuminating results.
The other thing, of course, is that most of us don’t know Irish politics very well, so we can only suggest European questions!
I actually don’t know how long he has scheduled in his diary but am afraid to ask - “never ask a question you don’t know the answer to!” - I suspect the answer would be 30 minutes as that is what I asked for - but if the interview is going really well he will be loath to stop so it is best to leave that as vague as possible.
PS - he is a member of the Irish Parliament and not an MEP.
I told you we didn’t know Irish politics very well!
I’m sure I know less about Italian politics…