As predicted on here and by others, the talks on the next EU budget have failed to come to an agreement. Despite much talk that Britain would be isolated in it’s attempts to reduce the €1 trillion budget, it seems that it was not just the British but also the Eurozone creditor nations such as Germany and the Netherlands that disagreed with the proposals for an increase in EU spending. These creditor countries have already seen large sums of their tax payer’s money go to bail-outs for banks and more importantly for highly indebted Eurozone countries such as Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. As of today, it also seems that tiny Cyprus has joined the Eurozone casualty list. In this atmosphere, getting an agreement on a new budget was always going to be difficult. According to one report, the Germans are very unhappy that the EU President Van Rompuy attempted to isolate the British and have been quoted as saying “Herman Van Rompuy has f******* this up”.
For Ireland, as always in EU budget negotiations, the task is to protect the Common Agricultural Policy, a job made easier by French support for CAP. Small countries like Ireland almost always the need the support of larger countries such as France / Germany / the UK to protect their economic and political interests at EU level. The Guardian’s Data blog have a cool graphic on the EU budget broken down by country. Thanks mainly to CAP payments, Ireland is a net recipient in the EU, in other words we receive more in EU funds than we take in – we contribute €249 per person and receive €358 per person.
Herman Von Rompuy (Did he f*** up?)
bantrygeography 