Examination of Witnesses (Questions 37-39)
MR NEIL
O'BRIEN
9 MAY 2007
Q37 Chairman: Mr O'Brien, we seem to
have a trail of Irish origin, including my own, obviously, with
the Donnellys and the O'Briens. I am sure that shows that we come
from a nation that has a wider interest in Europe and not necessarily
just in our own homeland. If you do not mind, I will call you
Neil. You have given us a very thorough submission, which I read
with interest, and it could probably make a document in its own
right to interrogate you on, but I think we will stick to the
Annual Policy Strategy Document 2008. You heard what we said about
how this document forms a discussion document with other institutions
and then hopefully leads to the Work Programme. Could I ask you
what you perceive the role of the APS to be?
Mr O'Brien: I think that this
is a useful document and a useful meeting for you to be having,
because it is important for this Committee to try and get, as
it were, further upstream in the process, and it is good to know
what is coming, though I would say that it is only useful up to
a point. It is good to know that certain ideas are in the pipeline.
For example, there is a proposal in here which talks, in passing,
about the Global Climate Policy Alliance as if this is something
that we should all have heard of. It is not something I have heard
of, even though I work full-time on the EU, and when you go on
the Internet to search for what this Global Climate Policy Alliance
proposal, is the only reference I can find in the entire world
to it is in this document. So, the Commission clearly have a very
clear idea about what they want to do, but unless you start looking
further upstream, like we are in this document, then it is very
difficult to find out what is coming at you. I think that looking
further ahead is useful but really there is only so much that
this Committee can do with the current structure. Hopefully those
of you who were on the Committee in 2006 would have got our proposal
about how we think the powers of this Committee should be expanded
and its mandate increased. I think the most important problem,
which we sort of touched on before, is that the Executive at the
moment is not playing by the rules. We have had something like
400 scrutiny overrides since 2001 alone, we are currently using
Article 308 just under twice a month and I am glad to see that
is now becoming an issue. In particular, there is a big piece
in The Independent today about your skewering of Joan Ryan
and her explanation of "when an agreement is not an agreement"
and why this Committee can be by-passed.
Q38 Chairman: Can I suggest that
maybe we are diverting into territory that we all dearly love
but is not necessarily to do with the Annual Policy Strategy Document.
Do you consider this year's Annual Policy Strategy Document, the
2008 one which is before us, to be a useful planning tool on which
the Commission bases its dialogue with institutions?
Mr O'Brien: Yes, this one does
seem to be a bit crisper, or at least coherent, than previous
ones. As I said before, a lot of this is at a very high level
of generality. Various proposals are mentioned but not very well
explained, and I think, as I have said before, more generally,
there should be a greater attempt going much beyond this document
to try and get focused on proposals in documents at a much earlier
stage in the whole process.
Q39 Chairman: Do you think, therefore,
that this process and this document, which will obviously lead
to the Work Programme, that will take into account the views of
the institutions with whom the dialogue takes place, or do you
find that it comes out of the Work Programme much as it went in
as the Annual Policy Strategy Document?
Mr O'Brien: I am afraid I think
that national parliaments in this Committee are very much at the
end of the food chain. I thought it was significant before that
there were very few examples of how national parliaments have
influenced the Commission's Work Programme. I think that other
factors are a lot more important. Principally this is about the
Commission driving its own agenda.
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