Managing Europe From Home: The Europeanisation of the Irish ...

awareness of developments in the EU but it concentrated, on the whole, on
discussing topical issues instead of monitoring the flow of EU legislation. At a time
when the EU expanded its remit to cover most areas of member states’ governance,
parliamentary scrutiny of EU legislation in Ireland and of Ireland’s European policy
was weak.
SECTION II - STRUCTURES
The Irish Administrative System and the EU 19
Given the reach of EU policies on national policy making, every department and
office in the Irish core executive system is required to deal with the European Union
in some way. The extent of interaction and need to manage EU business depends
primarily on the degree of Europeanisation found in the respective policy domains of
each office and department. It is possible to place the Irish core executive system’s
management of EU business on three distinct levels based on this criterion:
19 The material that forms the basis of the following analysis was gathered from
detailed analysis of documentary evidence (including strategy statements from
government departments) and two extensive series of structured interviews with
those involved in managing Ireland’s EU affairs. The first round of interviews (47 in
total) was conducted by Professor Brigid Laffan as part of the research carried out
between 1999 and 2000 for Organising for a Changing Europe: Irish Central
Government and the European Union, published in 2001. The second round of
interviews was conducted in the first half of 2002. 30 structured interviews were
conducted and interviewees for this stage of the project included civil servants drawn
from most departments throughout the Irish system, and included representatives
from the political and parliamentary arenas.