De Valera's heirs fail us in Europe

The line from Eamon de Valera's political heirs has been fairly consistent for a while now. Late last year, his granddaughter, the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Sile de Valera, was complaining that "directives and regulations agreed in Brussels impinge on our identity, culture and traditions".

Last week, her cousin and erstwhile junior minister, Eamon O Cuiv, claimed that during his time in the Departments of Agriculture, and Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, he had "direct experience of the inflexibility of the European bureaucracy and the difficulties in dealing with them". These Eurocrats, he said, "have had at times a totally irrational view on how much they want to dictate the detail as well as the general policy".

And in the current issue of the Connacht Telegraph, Eamon O Cuiv links himself and his cousin in an embattled alliance against the mad bureaucrats of Brussels. In their fight against them, "there have been some very scary moments for both Minister de Valera and myself during the last number of years where we were trying to facilitate ordinary people carrying out their normal activities".

The picture is clear enough. Power-mad but faceless, the odious administrators holed up in their impenetrable warrens of glass and steel issue their diktats. The Plain People of Ireland, going about their normal business, are beset by these dictatorial bullies, bent on undermining our identity and culture. Only for the bravery of the Chief's grandchildren, dodging policy directives as gallantly as the Long Fellow dodged bullets in Boland's Mills, we would all be eating bratwurst, wearing lederhosen and drinking schnapps. Every fol-a-diddledi-do would have become a fol-de-re, fol-de-ra.

The funny thing, though, is that when you try to figure out where these "very scary moments" might have been endured, the one thing that seems clear is that it wasn't in Brussels. If you have access to the Internet, you can go to the EU website and find the records of the meetings of the Council of Culture Ministers. This is the arena where the battle to protect our identity, culture and traditions (if such a thing is really going on) would have to be fought.

The minutes of the meetings name the participants. Generally, you will find most countries sent elected politicians, usually the Minister for Culture or the Minister of State, or both. To take one meeting at random, that of May 28th, 1998, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Finland and Sweden sent their Culture Ministers, Germany sent two Ministers of State, Denmark its Minister for Culture and the State Secretary for Culture, Spain and Austria their State Secretaries for Culture.

Two names that are conspicuously scarce, though, are Sile de Valera and Eamon O Cuiv. Of seven meetings I looked at between May 1998 and November 2000, Sile de Valera attended two. Eamon O Cuiv attended none. At five of the seven meetings, where most of the other countries had senior political figures, Ireland had only its deputy permanent representative to the European Union, Frank Cogan in 1998 and James Brennan subsequently. With no disrespect to James Brennan who is, I am sure, a very capable public servant, two things can be said about him. One is that he is a far less senior figure than most of those who attended these council meetings.

The other is that he is a bureaucrat. Or if you prefer the pejorative term for a Brussels-based bureaucrat, a Eurocrat. In other words, while most EU governments were represented at these meetings by elected, accountable politicians, our voice was that of a civil servant. If anyone is responsible for decisions being made by bureaucrats, it is, in this instance, Sile de Valera and Eamon O Cuiv.

James Brennan is, by the way, a busy man. I looked at random at the minutes of a meeting of the Council of Health Ministers on December 14th, 2000. This meeting seemed to have been especially important to Ireland, because as well as discussing an action programme on public health, it dealt with tobacco advertising, BSE/CJD and blood products, all issues relevant to the Irish public.

While Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden all managed to send their Ministers of Health, we were represented by deputy permanent representative Brennan.

The agenda for meetings of culture ministers may be somewhat less urgent, but the issues are nonetheless important. The November 1999 meeting which neither Sile de Valera nor Eamon O Cuiv attended dealt with a plan for employment in the cultural industries in Europe, with the protection of children in the digital age and with the EU's "Television Without Frontiers" plan.

The September 2000 meeting which they both missed dealt with national subsidies to film and audiovisual industries and with the Media Plus programme of EU support for audiovisual industries up to 2005.

By failing to turn up to these crucial meetings, Ministers such as Eamon O Cuiv and Sile de Valera don't just create the bureaucratic rule they pretend to be fighting against. They also add to the democratic deficit about which they rightly complain. How can they answer to the Dail about the decisions made at meetings they didn't even attend? Maybe they might have fewer scary moments with Brussels bureaucrats if they didn't leave the job of making policy to those same officials.