Brussels briefing
Ireland West MEP Jim Higgins seems to be intent on shaking up the country’s bus business.
Bus Éireann has for years received contracts for operating school bus services and subsidies worth €45m a year for operating routes in various parts of the country, including Dublin, Cork and Galway.
Now he and a number of private bus operators from Ireland and from the US say such contracts should go out to public tender.
They have complained to the EU’s Competition Commissioner, Joaquin Almunia, who has confirmed that he is investigating state aid for CIE bus companies nationwide.
Ireland is one of those countries reporting a decrease in the use of illegal drugs, but the country still has the highest number of drug-related deaths in the EU, after Estonia.
Ireland still ranks highest for opioid use — including heroin — though this may be partly due to better reporting than for some other countries.
Ireland, Britain and Norway accounted for 92% of the bacterial infections such as anthrax, which occurred from injecting drugs, reported over the past decade.
Ireland is listed as one of the countries with the highest use of ecstasy, at close to double the EU average. Cocaine use over the last year was above average — third after Britain and Spain.
Despite this, the new combined drugs and alcohol strategy ready to be launched last year has been delayed since last year’s elections.
Having had Greece ad nauseam on the EU agenda for what seems like decades, it was strange having a full summit of EU leaders with not a word about the stricken country.
Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras was absent, banned from travelling for fear of losing his sight.
Perhaps it was all to the good since the words, “Similar cases will be treated equally” followed mention that “Ireland’s financial sector would be examined” to improve the likelihood that it could pay its debts.
For the second time in the past year the European Commission withdrew videos they hoped would go viral to spread a necessary message. First it was about tolerance but featured strangely European looking robots against strangely non-European looking evil-ones.
This time it was part of a campaign to increase awareness and interest among young women in science-related careers. It bit the dust after being accused of sexism.
The accompanying website is a bit sugary-pink. A pity they don’t seem to be able to get it right — after all they are the only ones doing anything in this essential area.
Perhaps they are spending too much money on research and professionals — better to get the kids in the act of creation in the future.
Big business tends to benefit most from the EU’sagriculture subsidies. Now it is targeting the other big EU budget — research.
Around €4.5bn will be made available for agri research, much of it intended to help produce better quality food in a way that does not damage our environment.
But the agribusiness lobbyists outnumber other lobbyists four to one and are working hard to capture as much of it as possible for the mammoth companies now producing the bulk of what we eat.
Final decisions on just where the agriculture and research money will go are likely to be made under the Irish presidency next January.
The increase in Ireland’s health spending in the nine years from 2000 was among the EU’s highest — but in one year it was almost all clawed back.
An OECD report showed that in most countries the share of GDP going on health services survived the first few years of the recession. But in 2010 it fell in most EU countries — and nowhere more dramatically than Ireland.
The spend per person has dropped close to what it was in 2007, but the big change is in the amount coming from the public purse and coming from private sources.
In 2010, just under 70% of the health spend came from the public purse, the smallest share ever possibly, and certainly since 1960. More than 30% came from people’s own pockets and private health insurance.
One of the ugliest compromises among the many, many compromises reached in the EU was signed off at the summit last week.
After 30 years of fighting between member states, 25 countries finally agreed a system to allow people to apply for and get a single patent for their inventions rather than having to apply to each country individually.
Thousands of patents have been lost to Europe as the cost sent people to the US where they could register at a fraction of the cost of trying to do so in the EU.
But for the past two years the three biggest countries — Germany, France and Britain — that complain loudest about the single market being held to ransom each demanded the patent offices and court go to them. They agreed to divide it between the three — not a very original idea.
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