Ireland's EU budget proposal has no 'weak points', Irish minister says

Negotiations on the next long-term European Union budget are entering the final stretch. As it happened, Ireland presently holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU and presented a compromise on the size of the bloc's next seven-year budget ahead of tomorrow's EU summit. The proposal suggested chopping 141 billion euros off the the 1.7 trillion euro draft on the table well it did not go down well as Dublin has been in line for a kicking from all sides since the idea was published are the cuts too small or too big that's the billion euro question joining me now is the Irish Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs Neil Richmond good morning Grace to have you on so one could argue that when you make everybody unhappy you did a good job um but that doesn't get us any closer to to a EU budget um how far are how far apart are the positions within the EU Council i think what we've been able to achieve in the last week is a demonstration of what is actually realistic we were able to take the Commission proposal and over an intense number of months had four different meetings at ambassador level three different meetings at ministerial level and scores dozens of bilateral meetings between our Minister for European Affairs Thomas Byrne our prime minister with their counterparts across the Union to produce something that member states is reflective of the really broad opinion of member states so i think certainly leaders will discuss this this week and we very much hope that we'll be able to hand over this document at the end of our presidency in December and move to a very clear situation of a strong European budget that despite all the claims, is still 30% bigger than the last EU budget and I think that's been lost a lot in the commentary of the last number of days. What would you say is the weakest point of your proposal? I don't think our proposal has a weak point because as Presidency we've acted as an honest broker we are a net contributor as a member state but we strongly believe in cohesion and investment in the Union we benefit from that. We've been able to take very clear priorities when it comes to security, competitiveness, overseas development assistance and make sure that a proposal that is still an increase on the last budget that can still provide a European Union budget that is ambitious to achieve our aims is on the table and we now move it over to leaders and we fundamentally think an agreement can be achieved at trilogue you mentioned security and defense are supposed to be Europe's new priorities why should Europeans believe that when your proposal reduces spending actually in these areas but it's a massive increase on the last European budget and a lot of people get focused just on the Commission proposal it's very very important but you look at that is a proposal you look at what the actual spending was under the last budgetary terms obviously Europe is a considerably different place now and this actually has real investment but in addition to that we've also seen legislative advancements over the last number of years which put security and defense and security and defense isn't just binary a real investment in overseas development assistance is key to security investment in our CAP and our food is key because food security is going to be huge battle too we have time for one very short question and you mentioned it uh you want to get this done by the end of the year before the French presidential election next year how is this realistic yes or no absolutely