Shona Murray

speaker

311 appearances 6 recordings 5 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 26 Jun

Shona Murray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 4.

Appearances

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Taking Stock · Are 20-somethings worse off? Cost of the EU presidency & Diversification in passive income · 19 Jun 2026 podcast

It's an awful pity, Seán, you don't tell us how you really feel.

Well, it's just I just think that sometimes these conversations boil down to something for which the actual proper detail, you know, doesn't really emerge when you just start talking at pounds and pence.

And I just think that that is something that got lost on the Brits during the Brexit debate.

They just wanted to know what they were getting out of it.

And you just don't get anywhere.

Yeah, I mean, it's a big job because the Cypriots started off the negotiations because basically there's a consensus in Europe that the EU budget has to be reduced fairly dramatically because each country is spending much more on certain things, particularly around defence.

So they don't want to put as much money into the EU budget, even though the EU itself is actually a good vehicle for defence because of joint procurement and so on.

But anyway...

The consensus amongst member states is that the Cypriots haven't done a satisfactory job so far.

Now, they've done a great job with so many other things, but member states aren't happy with what the Cypriots have proposed for the budget.

So it's now down to the Irish, which will start off in a couple of weeks.

And so that will be a hugely important matter to get signed off by November, which will come to the end of our presidency because the EU budget kicks in at the end of 2027.

So it'll really need to be signed off and a lot of the details will have to be worked out by the end of November.

That will be very tricky.

The negotiations for the EU budget are the most contentious by far, bar nothing.

I remember during last time's EU budget negotiations, the kind of final talk started on a Saturday and I think we finished on a Wednesday.

So they go down through the night to the wire and there's lots of disagreements.

And Ireland obviously will want to protect certain interests in relation to, you know, CAP and so on.

So Ireland will have its interests played at the table, but it'll also have to have another hat, which is a neutral observer and a facilitator for all member states to collaborate and converge on one issue.

Yeah, I mean, that is a question that it's always facing Ireland anyway, given that we do have all those companies in Ireland.

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