Ireland screwing up too many EU laws

Issued : Tuesday 9 March, 2010

Government causing excessive regulation

Speaking on the future of the internal market, Alan Kelly highlighted Ireland's poor performance on the EU's internal market scoreboard.

"The Irish government needs to seriously address the issue how it applies EU laws in Ireland. We are among the worst countries for misapplying EU law.

"The Commission in its latest Internal Market scoreboard highlighted fifteen occasions where Ireland took an EU directive and screwed up the implementing of it.

"Most of these related to environmental and financial services directives and the Commission has even warned that they expect Ireland to get worse.

"There were another seventeen directives where they did not apply them into Irish law in time.

"The scoreboard is a table designed to compare how each EU state treats EU law. It showed that our performance was deteriorating and given the new increased powers for fines under the Lisbon Treaty, it is in our interests to improve.

"Some times this is for legitimate reasons when the Irish government is appealing a law to the European court. However there are too many instances where we get it wrong or delay it for no apparent reason.

"Furthermore, you often hear about over-zealous EU regulation.

"Well if this is how we are treating EU law then it raises the question of who is really responsible for the excessive regulation.

"Our scrutiny system for EU legislation is nowhere near good enough.

"Perhaps when we reform the Seanad, they could have an EU specific role so that we get proper adoption of EU legislation in future."