Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-11-05-Speech-3-141"
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"en.20031105.10.3-141"2
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"Mr President, I have listened very patiently to what has been said. However, I should like to return to the realities. What are those realities? A new financial regulation has been decided on, by a vote in the European Parliament. That new financial regulation has consequences. Parliament was aware, when it voted in favour of the new financial regulation, that it would have consequences. Now one of those consequences is that it is impossible to go on funding certain bodies in the way they have been funded in the past. That is the problem. Therefore we had to find a solution. The easiest solution would have been to say that we shall just apply the financial regulation, then close the door and that would be the end of it. The Commission, however, because it cares about bodies involved in youth, education and culture, did not choose the easy way out. It chose the difficult way. In other words, despite the new financial regulation we are trying to ensure that we can continue to fund those bodies, and we have done so, because the proposal which is on the table now allows us to continue to finance the College of Europe in Bruges, the European University Institute in Florence, the Academy of European Law in Trier, the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht, the Human Rights Centre in Venice, the Jean Monnet Chairs etc. It also allows us to finance – and I shall not read the whole list, Mr President – the orchestras, the Chorale Academy, Europa Cantate, the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation, the Youth Academy Foundation, Europa Nostra, the Artists’ Villages, Europalia, Euroballet, the Pegasus Foundation, the Boniface Memorial Foundation, and so on. There are dozens of them, Mr President. It also enables us to continue to provide funding for the Youth Forums and the youth organisations.
I am sorry, but when I hear that all these things will no longer be funded, I wonder what I have been doing for the last few months in trying to continue the funding despite a financial regulation which no longer permits that funding. I think it is very disagreeable of Parliament to tell us that it received the proposal too late. Parliament received the proposal in May, and we are now in November. Why did Parliament not receive the proposal until May? It could have received it a month or two earlier. It did not receive it then because, during those months, the Commission was achieving the impossible in order to safeguard cultural bodies, educational bodies and youth bodies, and in order to proceed in the direction desired by the European Parliament, in order to give assistance to those beneficiaries which Parliament had selected, quite rightly, so that they could switch from one system to the other without any interruption. That is what we were doing during the months before May.
What remains to be done now, then? What remains to be done is for Parliament to come to an agreement with the Council, because all our legal services have told us that earmarking, for example, which was Parliament’s idea, would not be possible. It was thanks to the Commission, to its assiduousness, and the way it forged ahead in order to find an intermediate solution, that it was possible to safeguard Parliament’s earmarking. The new financial regulation makes no provision for earmarking. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, let us keep both feet firmly on the ground. If we took so long, it was because we needed to find solutions to an impossible situation, solutions that would be in the interests of our cultural, educational and youth bodies.
Parliament now has to vote on the amendments. The Chairman of the Committee on Budgets has made it very clear: either Parliament votes in favour of those amendments which are likely, in the codecision procedure, to meet with the Council’s agreement, in which case from January onwards, all those bodies to which we are committed will receive their money, or it votes in favour of amendments which will never receive agreement from anybody, in which case, come January, the bodies that I have just referred to, and there are dozens and dozens of them, will not receive any money at all.
I have done everything I can, Mr President, to make a solution possible. I hope Parliament and the Council, for their part, will also do everything they can to ensure that the solution can be implemented with effect from January 2004."@en1
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