MEPs put in longer hours than members of any other European assembly

YOUR report headlined ‘MEPs miss one in five sessions of parliament’ is misleading in a number of respects, notably in its completely inaccurate statement that the European Parliament “sits about 30% fewer days than the Dáil”.

In practice, the European Parliament meets during more weeks in the year, and has shorter recesses than any European national parliament of which I am aware. The European Parliament’s summer recess, for example, is only from the third week of July to the third week of August, and its Easter recess is only for four days.

The confusion stems from only taking into account days devoted to plenary sessions as opposed to days devoted to other parliamentary activities, such as parliamentary committee meetings.

In most parliaments, such as the Dáil, committee meetings and plenary sessions usually coincide on the same day whereas this is practically never the case in the European Parliament.

Any accurate measure of working hours in the European Parliament (as well as of MEP activities) must thus take into account the different activities not just in plenary, but also in the powerful parliamentary committees and political groups (without which there would be no reports to consider in plenary), as well as the less frequent but still important parliamentary delegations to such meetings as the climate change and WTO talks. It is not easy to get the balance right between working with constituents, helping to shape EU legislation in committees, cooperating with colleagues of 26 other nationalities and debating and voting on the final outcome in the plenary.

Judging the parliament by the time spent on the last activity alone is to give a completely wrong impression of the way in which it works

Francis Jacobs

Head of the European Parliament Office in Ireland

Molesworth Street

Dublin 2