Ambiguous Republic by Diarmaid Ferriter

Author:Diarmaid Ferriter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2012-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTY - SIX

NEGOTIATING THE BENEFITS AND THE DILEMMAS

As Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1973, Garret FitzGerald was in a pivotal position to increase Irish influence at the EEC; he was involved in many formal and informal meetings of foreign ministers in Europe and frequently at these meetings was able to produce detailed notes of previous meetings to correct people.1 But it had also become apparent that Irish representatives at the EEC would have to fight to be heard and to push the notion of investment in undeveloped regions due to its comparative poverty compared to some of the bigger and richer member states, and to get adequate information on time. The EEC Committee of Irish Civil Servants included Paul Keating, appointed secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs in April 1974, who questioned the value of EEC summit meetings that produced nothing concrete from an Irish point of view. As he put it in October 1974 ‘if we were to get anything on regional policy we could go along’, while a counsellor from the Department of Foreign Affairs ‘said the small countries were irrelevant to the last summit and would be irrelevant to the next one … Mr Keating said the only thing we could get out of it was regional policy.’2

Denis Maher, an assistant secretary in the Department of Finance, was equally gloomy and ‘said we would be dependent on the secondary spillover from anything the larger member states would get … we could provide technical assistance, but there was no money in that’.3 The following month, FitzGerald was disappointed that in relation to the Regional Fund, there had been ‘no adequate budge’ at a meeting in Brussels, while there were complaints from the Department of the Taoiseach that in relation to a meeting of EEC heads of government in Paris in December 1974, ‘briefings for meetings of this level have tended to be too long and too late’.4 Two years later, ahead of a summit meeting in Luxembourg in relation to an examination of monetary questions, FitzGerald wrote that ‘experience is that Commission papers on this subject arrive well after the 11th hour’ while the following year he suggested in relation to a Commission communication to the European Council on the economic situation: ‘While parts of it are somewhat waffly, it is reasonably good on the whole.’5

The visit of Jacques Chirac, the French prime minister, to Dublin earlier in 1974 had provided an opportunity to press for the Regional Fund but it was not until the conference of heads of government in Paris in December 1974 that it was agreed a Regional Fund would be put into operation with effect from January 1975. The fund was not actually established until March 1975 but over the course of the next few years began to bear fruit. From the fund, in 1975, the commitment to Ireland was £8.3 million and increased thereafter in 1976 (£14.4 million), 1977 (£12.6 million), 1978 (£23.6 million) and up to the summer of 1979 (£31.9 million).

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