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IRELAND IS SET to lose one of its 12 MEPs when the next European elections are held in June 2014.
The cut follows the approval by a European Parliament committee of a draft report which reallocates the number of MEPs to make space for Croatia when it joins the union this July.
The recommendation by Europe’s Constitutional Affairs committee will see seats scraped from a number of other countries – predominantly larger ones – in order to make room for the 11 seats that Croatia will receive as a result of its population.
After the rearrangement, Ireland (population 4.6 million) will be alongside Croatia (4.3 million) and Lithuania (2.9 million) in the number of MEPs it holds.
The new arrangements also account for shifts in populations in other countries, and will see Spain gain four MEPs – from 50 to 54 – while France and Sweden will both get two more, to 74 and 19 respectively.
Committee approval means the new system for seat assignments – which brings the membership up to 751, its legal limit under the Lisbon Treaty – is almost guaranteed to be approved by the parliament as a whole next month.
The proposal will then be sent to the European Council – the body made up of the heads of government of all 27 member states – for final approval.
The rearrangement will mean some difficulty for the Irish government, however, as last year’s Constituency Commission assumed Ireland would keep 12 MEPs when it proposed to maintain the status quo for the 2014 elections.
New legislation will need to be brought through the Oireachtas this year to redesign the constituencies that currently exist – and possibly lead to another reform of the European constituencies.
Ireland’s 12 MEPs are currently split equally between four constituencies: Dublin (which incorporates the four Dublin council areas), South (all of Munster except Clare), East (all of Leinster excluding Dublin, Westmeath and Longford) and North-West (the remainder of the country).
The cut to 11 will mean the constituencies will have to be redrawn – and because Irish law requires the seats to return either 3, 4 or 5 members, the most likely prospect is a single constituency for Dublin (or the greater Dublin area) with the remainder of the country split on a north-south basis.
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Cos that decisions not gonna cause any problems.
“A nonagenarian lawyer representing a Hindu deity “ ..well presumably the lawyer for the other side is also representing a fictitious deity?
This is a very dangerous development.
@Gary Sheahan: why?
When the gods start warring with each other it seems to go on forever .I wonder did ever hear about a Good Friday kind of thing and follow their poor mortals and come up with some sort of arrangement
Hmm, what could possibly go wrong?
India going out of their way to piss off the muslims
@Mr.Misery: yep the Danes and French caused mayhem with a couple of cartoons. What are the Indians thinking??
@Greg Daniel: PM Modi is a Hindu ethno-nationalist, he’s been whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment for ages in India as a means to get into and hold onto power-he is a dangerous individual who will end up formenting mass murder if he’s not careful
@Mr.Misery: What could India possibly have against the religion that killed as many as 80 million of their people?
@DJ François: Yep, definitely. Kashmir was only the start of it. Now this. Lots more to come
@Fifty Shades of Sé: 80 million Indians killed by Muslims? Where did you get that from?
@Fifty Shades of Sé: religion killed 80 million? Hope they caught it.
@DJ François: hate mongering at it’s worst
@Niall Carry: I’m a Hindu. I know what we have suffered at the hands of invaders since time immemorial
But that is what Islam does, look at all the Christian sites in Israel as they all had an Islamic site built on most of them. And Christians did the same to pagan sites and so on and so on…
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