Mary Regan

speaker

767 appearances 11 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 12 Sep

Mary Regan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 11 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Indo Daily · Drones, cyber-attacks and Putin's war: Is Micheál Martin's EU Presidency a poisoned chalice? · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

But there is a French ship that will be docked in Dublin, equipped with anti-aircraft missiles.

The main thing is the illegal drone activity that was reported during the Danish presidency of the EU.

And that is something that is the kind of main concern here.

That is the main risk, really.

The government did in the run-up to this secure extra funding, you know, I think it was in the region of 1.7 billion for defence under the revised National Development Plan, and that was to sort of bolster defence capabilities for the duration of the presidency.

I don't think there are fears over an incident as such, just more fears of something that might prove more an embarrassment than anything else.

Yeah, so you're right in saying that it will be negotiated, the budget for the next seven years, it's called the Multi-Annual Financial Framework, the NFF, for the next seven years will be negotiated over the next six months.

So it's going to be one of the bigger challenges for the EU presidency.

And it requires all 27 member states and the European Parliament to agree to it.

So Ireland will be under pressure in many ways to secure that agreement from the 27 member states over the next six months before it goes on to the next steps.

Now, whether we can influence or not, like technically the answer to that should be no, because we're supposed to be sort of impartial chairs.

But of course, from a domestic point of view, there is a lot at stake here for Ireland because

there is this proposal on the table to cut the common agricultural policy by 20%.

So it's a big cut there.

And I mean, the thinking is the EU budget has to sort of be restructured in many ways.

And, you know, further complication factor being that there's a French government

Presidential election next year.

It's about a year away and they'll want to have it done before then, because if, for example, Jordan Bardella or Marina Penn came in, they might want to slash France's contribution to the budget.

So that would be one of the big pieces that Micheál Martin will want to get done.

This has been an issue in Ireland's presidencies of the EU in the past.

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