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The commissioner

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  • 10-06-2008 1:51am
    #1
    Lockstep
    Registered Users Posts: 9,029 ✭✭✭


    Admittedly I've paid almost no attention to this aspect of the Treaty.

    What exactly does the commissioner do? Will losing him/her have any effect?

    I keep hearing that the commissioner doesn't represent Ireland so why do we have one?


    Any advice appreciated.


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    #2
    sink
    Registered Users Posts: 4,314 ✭✭✭sink


    It's a common misconception that we 'have' a commissioner we don't. The commissioner is not 'ours' the commissioner represents his/her policy areas on Europe's behalf and puts forward legislation for debate and ratification by the European council and the European parliament. We only get to nominate a commissioner, the nominee then can either be accepted or reject by the council. Once nominated the commissioner is not answerable to his/her country, they are answerable to the European council and the European parliament. Nor is the Irish governments point of contact on the commission the Irish commissioner, the government will go to whoever deals with the policy area in question, e.g. if the government wants to discuss agriculture with the commission they will go to the agricultural commissioner regardless of which country the are from. The commission also does not vote or hold a veto and one commissioner can't block another commissioner from putting forward legislation.

    I explained the institutional reforms the Lisbon treaty will bring in this post.
    http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=56084986&postcount=9


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    #3
    Scofflaw
    Registered Users Posts: 23,283 ✭✭✭✭Scofflaw


    kickoutthejams wrote: »
    Admittedly I've paid almost no attention to this aspect of the Treaty.

    What exactly does the commissioner do? Will losing him/her have any effect?

    I keep hearing that the commissioner doesn't represent Ireland so why do we have one?

    Any advice appreciated.

    Hmm. The Commission is the "supra-national" bit of the EU - the bit that exists solely to be the EU, if you see what I mean. The two other main bodies - the Council and the Parliament - represent respectively the governments of the EU states, and the citizens of the EU states.

    Why do all the countries have a Commissioner if the Commission doesn't represent the countries? Basically, because the EU/EC was originally set up by a group of countries who didn't trust each other worth spit, so they each insisted on having "their man" on the Commission just in case anyone else's Commissioner didn't play fair.

    Time has gone by, and the EU has become responsible for more things, and the Commission has had a pretty good track record of not favouring any country over others. The governments have relaxed about it, and the big countries have seen that having two Commissioners didn't make any real difference - the Commission was behaving impartially, as it was supposed to. So the Commissioners dropped to one per country.

    Now we have the problem that the EU has, in effect, 27 "ministers" (each Commissioner is supposed to head up an EU 'department'), with some countries having quite silly jobs like the "Commissioner for Multilingualism" where others have really powerful ones like the "Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services" (McCreevy). So the member states have agreed to reduce the numbers.

    To see why 27 is a silly number, think of them like Ministers, and consider that the whole EU civil service is 30,000 people (Ireland's civil service is 350,000, and we have a maximum of 15 Ministers to run that). The EU civil service as a whole is smaller than the HSE, which is run by Mary Harney and a couple of Ministers of State.

    However, the principle of parity between member states is still important, largely for prestige reasons it seems, so what's been agreed is a reduction to a rotating Commission, with only two-thirds of the countries having a Commissioner at any given time, but everyone still getting exactly the same amount of Commission "time".

    As to what the Commission does - it's the main body for proposing EU legislation (other sources are initiatives from a group of Member States, initiatives from the European Parliament, requests from the Court of Justice, recommendations from the European Central Bank and requests from the European Investment Bank for the adoption of a legislative act).

    Commissioners can only propose legislation relating to their department. They don't vote on legislation, and have no veto. They propose, but the Council (and to a lesser extent the Parliament*) dispose.

    *currently the Parliament gets to vote on 80% of EU legislation under the so-called 'co-decision procedure'. If Lisbon passes this will increase to 95% of EU legislation.


    In very brief - the Commission contains someone from each member state "just in case" someone else's Commissioner turns out not to be impartial, and for national prestige. That the Commission has turned out to be impartial over the years has made the former reason less important. Suspicious nationalists, however, still absolutely insist their country has to have a Commissioner, even though they don't represent the country anyway - see for example the Libertas ads probably on this page.

    On that subject, by the way, the reduction of the Commission is in Nice anyway. So it will happen whether Lisbon passes or not.

    cordially,
    Scofflaw


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    #4
    Stabshauptmann
    Registered Users Posts: 4,885 ✭✭✭Stabshauptmann


    In theory a commissioner is impartial, in practice they often are not. Many are claiming that Charlie McCreevys changes to the third UCITS directive is purely because hes trying to protect Irish business.

    Anyway, even if they were impartial its nice to pick the person. Its like picking a judge - you appoint someone with the mindset / outlook that will be good for you in the long run


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    #5
    DishonestPikey
    Registered Users Posts: 62 ✭✭DishonestPikey


    Kaptain Redeye wrote: »
    In theory a commissioner is impartial, in practice they often are not. Many are claiming that Charlie McCreevys changes to the third UCITS directive is purely because hes trying to protect Irish business.

    Anyway, even if they were impartial its nice to pick the person. Its like picking a judge - you appoint someone with the mindset / outlook that will be good for you in the long run

    Who nominates the commisioner? And if the commissioners nationality is irrelevant then why are they rotating the commissioners? If nationality was truely irrelavent then you could have the possibilty of all commissioners being the same nationality, or one country having a majority simply because their nominations happen to be the best people for the job.

    Edit: sorry this is answered in Scofflaw's post above.


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