Tag: irish presidency

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The Irish Presidency Negotiating Box

The Irish Presidency has yesterday published its proposal for the MFF 2028-2034 negotiating box (‘negobox’) for consideration by the General Affairs Council on 13 October and the European Council summit on October 15-16. The negobox builds on the Commission’s MFF Regulation proposal but reduces its overall size by 8% compared to that proposal.

The MFF negotiations are always a tug-of-war between the Friends of Cohesion (mainly net recipients from the EU budget, in favour of an increased EU budget and supportive of both the Commission proposal and maintaining spending on traditional areas of agriculture and cohesion) and the Frugals (all net contributors to the EU budget, seeking a significant reduction in the size of the budget compared to the Commission proposal and in favour of modernising the budget by switching expenditure from the traditional areas to competitiveness, industrial policy, the green transition and security (read the Friends of Cohesion position here and the Frugals position here).… Read the rest

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Welcome to the Irish Presidency

Ireland took over the EU Presidency from 1 January 2013 and the Irish Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Simon Coveney, will chair the Council of Agricultural Ministers for the next six months. Coveney is an energetic Minister and the Irish have an experienced bunch of officials (see who’s who in the Irish delegation) who will do everything to ensure an agreement on CAP reform on their watch.
Securing an agreement under the Irish Presidency is conceivable. But I am going to argue that the institutional decision-making process between the Council and the Parliament, as well as the linkage with the Multi-annual Frinancial Framework (MFF) negotiations, will make it extraordinarily difficult, even assuming that the European Council will reach an agreement on the next MFF at its next meeting on 7-8 February 2013.
In this post I discuss my understanding of the decision-making process (the ordinary legislative procedure, also known as co-decision) over the next six months.… Read the rest