The Taoiseach, Mr Bruton, paid a timely visit to Brussels yesterday, lobbying for Ireland's interests in respect of European Union transfers and later meeting his colleagues in the Christian Democrat group of heads of state or government. As the European Commission frames its budgetary policy both for next year and in the longer term for EU enlargement it is essential that the Government address itself squarely to the task, at a time when this State outgrows its entitlements under the existing schemes. There is a strong case to be made for new criteria and structures for aid and for a soft landing in the coming period when the transfers will level off because of their very success in stimulating Ireland's development.
Over the next five years a daunting EU agenda faces whatever government is elected in the forthcoming election, most of it concerned with the maternal effects and rewards of Ireland's participation in the Union. Economic and monetary union is the most imminent and strategic of these, and is now coming more clearly and persistently on to the political agenda. It should not be allowed to overshadow the important budget reform negotiations which will determine the level of contributions, structural and cohesion funds from 1999 to 2004; nor the reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy within the EU and in the context of the World Trade Organisation. Central to these negotiations will be preparation for enlargement of the EU by up to 12 more states, all of them? poorer and more dependent on agriculture than Ireland.
Given the determination of existing net contributors to reduce their EU payments, together with stringent efforts to meet the demanding criteria for monetary union, this looks a bleak prospect for Irish negotiators. Something has to give and it looks increasingly as if that will be EU enlargement, the momentum of which has noticeably slowed under pressure from monetary union. But it would be foolishly short-sighted for the Government to assume this would be an advantage for Ireland, or that it might reduce in any way the need to come to terms with greater self-reliance and, imaginatively and proactively, from proposing new criteria and structures by which Ireland could benefit from EU transfers well into the next century.
New criteria from which Ireland could benefit should include a greater priority for unemployment, for social as well as geographical inequalities, for continuing reliance on agriculture, for underdeveloped infrastructures and for over-reliance on foreign industrial investment. Ireland has benefited greatly from the existing structural and cohesion funds - partly, it should be remembered, because successive governments helped to invent the criteria that applied to them; A similar effort needs to be wade again.
And an equivalent effort needs to be put into changing the structures of government in Ireland that were developed to absorb EU transfers. It has been a clear policy of successive governments to have the whole State classified as an Objective 1 region of the EU, so that all its regions would qualify for structural and cohesion funds. Now that Ireland's economic growth has so spectacularly outstripped the respective 75 per cent and 90 per cent thresholds of average EU income that apply to these funds it is clearly time to reconsider the over-centralised structure of this State. This could allow its poorer regions to continue to benefit from EU transfers.