Only 90,000 pipes on the ceiling...

Next week I’m attending a meeting at the UN with an EESC delegation (more about that in another post) so I flew out this Friday morning to New York. I have a number of friends here that I haven’t seen for yonks and decided to make a weekend of it. First off this evening was a Dutch friend, Hugo, from EUI days. He took me to Keens Steak House. This was originally a gentlemen’s smoking den. The ceiling is covered with replicas of old clay pipes, but they also have some original pipes in glass cases,  including those of Buffalo Bill Cody, Teddy Roosevelt and John Barrymore. Albert Einstein, Adlai Stevenson and George McArthur were among a long list of occasional distinguished puffers. There’s no puffing anymore, but the food and company were great. My route home took me past the Empire State and the Chrysler Building. The latter is as beautiful as the former is boring, particularly at night.

a blocking minority

Those of you who come to this site regularly may be wondering what has happened. Where has he gone? Why has he stopped posting? Well, as I put it on Facebook, I have spent a lot of time and effort ‘resisting the slashers’ – sadly, without much success. On 1 December last year the Lisbon Treaty was at last implemented. Although it would create fresh responsibilities and tasks for all of the EU institutions, it was agreed by the budgetary authority that, in the context of their initial draft 2010 budgets, none of them should seek to budget for these new tasks and responsibilities, and this for the perfectly good reason that it would be of supreme political clumsiness to seem to be second-guessing how the Irish people would vote in their referendum on the Treaty. Unfortunately, just as the Treaty was finally ratified and implemented, the economic and financial crisis started to bite, and some member states started to engage in fiscal retrenchment and cut back their public sectors. As I have written in previous posts, it was not an ideal moment to be asking for fresh human and financial resources. At the same time, though, should and could the institutions simply forget their new obligations under Lisbon? The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions took their lead from the European Parliament, which also happens to be a twin arm of the budgetary authority. Having debated the pros and cons, the EP decided to table an amending budget for 2010. There ensued passionate and agonised debates within the EU’s two consultative bodies but, in the end, they felt they had little option but to follow suit. In the first place, they demonstrably had new tasks and roles. In the second place, what would it say for their commitment to the Treaty’s new provisions in areas such as subsidiarity and participatory democracy? So the two committees put in rigorously and conservatively costed bids for amending budgets for 2010 that were intentionally modest – the minimum necessary, was the spirit (rather than the maximum possible). They were comforted in their decisions when the EP’s bid was approved in its entirety. The member states, it seemed, had accepted the argument that, had the Lisbon Treaty already been ratified in the first half of 2009, the EP (like the two Committees) would have budgeted accordingly.

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