Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-22-Speech-2-147"
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"en.20021022.6.2-147"2
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"Madam President, if you want to find out what is really important for a person, do not ask them. Just ask to look through the stubs on their chequebook or the entries on their credit card account and you will find out. This afternoon we are actually looking through the stubs of the Commission's chequebook and what do we discover? EUR 2.4 billion spent on olives but EUR 240 million on the Socrates Education Programme for the European Union. As budget rapporteur for the Committee on Culture, I cannot but help notice that we spend one tenth of the money on education that we spend on olives.
On information for enlargement, the Commission proposed EUR 14 million in the budget – a good sum you might think, until you see that the subsidy proposed for bee keeping was EUR 16.5 million. I am not criticising support for bee-keeping, but I think that this Parliament was right to increase the amount that the Commission wanted for information on enlargement from EUR 14 million to EUR 21 million.
If people in the candidate countries and the existing countries do not understand enlargement, then we shall only have repeats of the problems that we experienced in Ireland. On that EUR 21 million, the Budgets Committee accepted the proposal from the Committee on Culture that EUR 1 million should be set aside for training future MEPs from the candidate countries. We had the President of Hungary here this morning, which shows that clearly politicians from the candidate countries are looking forward to joining this Parliament and they need training to be able to do that properly.
I am also pleased that we have been able, if this budget is now passed, to reinstate the amount of money for
learning, namely EUR 17 million as opposed to the Commission's proposal of EUR 9 million.
It is not just that our budgetary priorities are wrong, the system is also wrong. I will pay tribute to the support we have had from the budget rapporteur this year and from the Commission, but the Council is absent this afternoon. It has been absent from discussions with the committees looking at the proposed budget. It really should be ashamed of its position in this respect."@en1
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