Sceptical voters remain to be convinced of Europe’s merits

EVELYN BOYLAN, a working mother of two young children, is fairly typical of an Irish person when it comes to Europe.

“Europe is over there and I didn’t have any view on it really”, said the sales and marketing worker from Scotstown, Co Monaghan. “But I was curious and I decided to check it out.”

Her curiosity took her to Brussels and the European Citizens’ Consultations summit this week having been selected at the Dublin event earlier this year.

But even after meeting hundreds of her fellow EU citizens and discussing the best way to tackle the economic and social problems facing the union, she says the jury is still out on whether Ireland should be more involved or not.

But she will be one of the 31% of Irish citizens that say they will definitely vote in June’s elections and this time, she will quiz her local candidates about their intentions.

This is the first election in which Irish candidates cannot hold a seat in the Dáil or Seanad at the same time. The 44 candidates – including 11 sitting MEPs – are chasing 12 seats, three in each of the four constituencies. This is down from 13 in the outgoing parliament with Dublin taking the hit.

Even so every Irish vote is worth almost three German votes according to the principle of declining proportionality – the bigger the country the fewer MEPs per person.

Several countries have had their seats reduced in a drive to keep the enlarged union from having too big a parliament. Even so it will be 736 and increased to 754 if the Lisbon Treaty comes into force next year.

Uniquely the election to the parliament is by proportional representation, but only Ireland, Sweden, Denmark and Finland elect individual MEPs as the rest operate on a list system put forward by political parties.

The parliament is the most trusted of all the EU institutions.

Long a talking shop, the role of the parliament has changed dramatically over the last few years and now it has equal power to the national governments when deciding on legislation.

Each MEP’s mandate is a personal one and nobody can tell them what to do when it comes to votes.

They sit grouped in political groups (right, left, centre, green, eurosceptic) and not by country. You can check out how often an individual MEP votes in line with his group and his country on the website, www.VoteWatch.eu.

While the plenary sessions one week a month in Strasbourg can get most of the publicity, the really busy weeks are in Brussels when the 20 committees meet.

Most MEPs belong to at least one committee that specialises in for instance the environment, industry, the budget, and agriculture.

They take apart every piece of proposed legislation, discuss and investigate it, listen to the interest groups and decide what bits they like and what they don’t. Most times the amendments and changes voted through in committee are upheld by the parliament voting in plenary.

There can be three readings and lots of disagreement between the member states and the European Commission. If they can’t agree they hold conciliation sessions. If this fails, the directive can go down – as happened the Working Time Directive last month.

MEPs with a particular interest in an area can draw up their own initiative report setting out the case for action to be taken by the commission or the member state governments.

There are also annual reports on human rights and opportunities for MEPs to see situations for themselves such as visits to Gaza and Chad undertaken by Irish MEP Colm Burke.

The EP must approve the union’s €1 billion a year budget and manage it.

They scrutinise the management of the euro and the ECB president regularly explains his policies to the relevant committee. They have to approve the ECB president and the executive board, together with the president of the members of the commission put forward by the member states.