Greens are best attendees in the European Parliament – De Burca
New website shows Greens are best bet while Sinn Fein MEP for Dublin has 14th worst voting record in Europe
The Green Party’s MEP candidate for Dublin Senator Deirdre de Burca has welcomed a new website which tracks the attendance and voting behaviour of members of the European Parliament.
“Transparency in politics is a good thing and the new votewatch.eu website which launched today allows all citizens to see just how their MEPs performed – or underperformed – over the last five years.
“The website demonstrates that Green MEPs offer the best value for votes,” she said. “Not only do Green MEPs attend the Parliament’s plenary sessions and vote most frequently, they also have the most coherent voting record across all policy areas.
“The European Parliament is a legislative and budgetary assembly, so being there and voting is the nuts and bolts of an MEP’s job. While politicians will have good reasons why they miss occasional votes, this website looks at their performance over five years and provides very valuable insights for voters as to how hard working their representatives have been.
“What voters can take from this website, as they make up their minds about to endorse on 5 June, is that Green MEPs are the hardest working in Europe.”
“The 43 MEPs that belong to the Greens-EFA Group have attended 87.39% of important votes over the last five years – well above average,” she said.
“In the days ahead I will be looking more closely at how Dublin’s four MEPs have voted on important pieces of legislation over the last five years. From a green perspective it is not encouraging. Come election time I am confident that Dubliners will have no doubts that giving their support to a Green MEP candidate offers the best return for their vote.”
Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou MacDonald is by far the poorest attending Irish MEP, and is also one of the worst in Europe. Her attendance record of 57.19% – making it for only 171 out of the Parliament’s 299 plenary sitting days – ranks her number 765th out of the Parliament’s 778 members.
French Green Gérard Onesta, by contrast, is one of the Parliament’s six members with a 100% voting record.
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Votewatch.eu is an independent website set up to promote better debates and greater transparency in EU decision-making by providing easy access to, and analysis of, the political decisions and activities of the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers. Votewatch.eu uses the European Parliament’s own attendance, voting and activity data – available through the Parliament’s website – to give a full overview of MEP activities, broken down by nationality, national political party and European party grouping. Using sophisticated statistical methods developed by political scientists from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the website covers the Parliament’s activities during the entire 2004-2009 term.
