Morning Ireland

EU Summit: Waiting

by Cathal Mac Coille

Journalism, an old hand told me soon after I started in RTÉ, often consists of waiting. I'm remembering this as I sit through the third organised briefing of the morning, before EU leaders arrive to begin their summit meeting this afternoon. I didn't expect anything riveting to be revealed at this session, and so it turned out.

You may find what I'm about to say hard to understand unless, like me, you get up regularly before 5am. For us, encountering dullness from, say, around noon, is a recurring problem, like arthritis, only not painful. At least, not physically.

Our tolerance level sinks as the day goes on. We can still write emails, answer the phone, hang out washing, or perform all the usual daily tasks. But put us in a warm room in a comfortable chair and send over a few blasts of tedium and we're well on the way towards sleep. I'm talking, for example, about the likes of this:

“This question is still very much with us. But it is not the only question relating to this issue. Some member states wish to see this come together with a number of other questions. The important thing is to find the right moment for all of these questions, not necessarily to be answered together, but for the modality for handling each question to be outlined and discussed in a way that makes possible the addressing of all of the questions. Not necessarily at the same time, but....”

It was about a minute later, I think, that I felt a finger poking me sharply in the ribs. My Morning Ireland colleague, Shane McElhatton, thought I was asleep. Just because I had my eyes closed! He didn't realise that, having carefully noted down the above answer, I thought I would reflect carefully on its implications. With my eyes closed to, em, make it easier to concentrate.

The words quoted, by the way, were uttered by a spokesman for EU Council president Herman Van Rompuy. The subject was whether this EU summit would decide on the Irish appeal for a lowering of the interest rate charged on our 'bailout' loans (it won't). But you probably guessed that already.

After today's programme, I walked back to my hotel for breakfast, past hundreds of police officers, standing behind their mobile barbed wire fences. At first sight, you might think a hostile force had taken over the neighbourhood. But that's not what puzzled my eyes as I walked down Stevinstraat away from the EU office quarter. It was the fact that, in almost every direction, I could see buildings either being knocked down, constructed or refurbished.

It's been like this every time I've come here to work, for at least two decades. The refurbishing of the Commission's famous Berlaymont building, which lasted 13 years after flaky asbestos was found there in 1990, is one big reason. And the enlargement of the EU made finding extra office-space necessary. But the last enlargement (Bulgaria, Romania) took place four years ago.

So it's hard to understand why this seemingly never-ending spiral of demolishing, replacing, modernizing, landscaping and roadbuilding continues even now.