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

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In addition, it is hierarchical in that the Permanent Representative, the Deputy and the ambassador to the Political and Security Committee carry the authority of their position at the apex of the office. The Permanent Representative is the head of the office. Since 1973, Ireland has had seven Permanent Representatives who tend to stay in Brussels for an average of five years. The first permanent representative spent eight years in Brussels, which reflected the early phase of membership. Two of the Permanent Representatives had acted as deputies in the representation with the result that they had considerable EU experience. They came to the posts with considerable EU and Council experience. In 2001, Ireland appointed Anne Anderson to the post of Permanent Representative, the first woman member of COREPER. The cycle of Council, COREPER and working party business sets the tempo of work in the Representation. The Antici person (COREPER I) and Mertens (COREPER II) prepare the work COREPER with the Presidency and the Council Secretariat. Meetings of COREPER act as a filter between the political and the official. Issues are pushed to the limit here to determine if they should be sent up to the Council level or back down to the working parties for further consideration. At this level, national positions are highlighted and the representatives come under pressure from their counterparts. According to one former ambassador, the ‘real wearing down process goes on in COREPER’ because this is where the trade-offs takes place. According to this official, ‘The major job of the Permanent representative is to ask ‘is this something we can win’ and ‘what will I advise the Minster’ (Interview 55, 07.03.2002). There would be continuous and high level contact between Dublin and Brussels during sensitive negotiations on the stance Ireland should take. The members of COREPER II and I operate at the coalface between the national and the European and between the technical and the political. The aim of the ambassadors is to push things along and to solve the problems through negotiations. The ambassadors have a keen sense of where the eventual compromise will lie and they work to ensure that the political level can solve the outstanding political issues. They are very sensitive to each other’s problems and will try to assist the state in the most exposed position. Given the technical nature of much of the business of COREPER I, the deputy ambassador require considerable knowledge of the domestic issues. The ambassadors tend to challenge the briefing material they receive because they do not want to find themselves exposed at COREPER attempting to defend a position that was weakened through bad presentation or inattention to the evolution of the dossier.
SECTION III – PROCESSES AND PROCEDURES Having outlined the key structures in Section II, we turn now to how the structures work in practice. A key factor is the impact of the EU calendar and the collective agenda. No member state controls the emergence of issues on the EU agenda, the manner in which they are dealt with, the tempo of collective decision making and the eventual outcome. One of the central means by which the EU manages to create a capacity for collective decision making is to establish timetables for decision making— Commission annual and multiannual programmes, rotating Presidencies, multiannual sectoral programmes, multiannual financing, periodic reviews of legislation and programmes, and targets to be achieved by a certain date. The use of the calendar technique is a central feature of EU governance. The consequence of this for national administrations is that domestic processes and procedures must have the capacity to enable national actors participate in an extra-national policy making system with its own tempo and agenda setting dynamic. Moreover, domestic systems must have the capacity to participate in a number of different EU governance modes such as regulation, re-distribution, and benchmarking and light policy co-ordination. Codes, Rules and Guidelines that govern the handling of EU business Ireland’s management of EU business is not highly formalised. There is no Bible of European Affairs either for the system as a whole or within individual departments. Unlike the UK system there is no tradition of putting on paper Guidance Notes on substantive policy issues or horizontal procedural issues (Bulmer and Burch 2000) Those rules and guidelines that exist can be found in a series of Government Decisions, a small number rules and circulars issued from time to time by the Foreign Ministry and the Finance Ministry. The rules and guidelines that exist relate to the following matters: • Cabinet rules on how a memorandum should be prepared for and processed through the Cabinet; • Original Foreign Affairs Circular on how EU business should be handled (1973 and subsequently amended albeit rarely); • Department of Finance rules about notification of policies and programmes that might lead to a cost to the Exchequer;
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Managing Europe From Home: The Euro
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