By Tommy Gavin
Editor
Brussels is a city divided; on one side you have the Belgian Brussels where life goes on as it does in any major city, but on the other side you have the European Brussels, inhabited by eurocrats, bureaucrats and thousands of interns. This is the Brussels I came to see. Having failed to secure the parliamentary internship I applied for at the beginning of summer, I along with 30 other runners up were invited to visit the European Parliament and witness the grand European project first hand. There for a day and a half, the tour of the European Parliament lasted at most 5 hours, and we went straight to it from the airport, having departed Dublin at 6am. We were delayed getting into the parliament, as security was on full alert in light of ongoing protests, and demonstrators were setting fire to piles of rubbish across the city’s busiest streets. There had already been several demonstrations in the recent weeks and Nessa Childers, MEP for Ireland East through whom we came to be there, disclosed that she had inadvertently been tear gassed on the way to work the week previous. It all seemed very tense and dramatic at the time, but it later turned out that the protesters were Belgian bin men who had staged an impromptu strike against cuts on an entirely local level, and it just happened to be a coincidence that it was in the capital of European political affairs, as was the case with the earlier protests. The irony that the model of European integration was based out of a country that isn’t even really integrated in itself wasn’t lost on us, and we eventually got inside.
The tour itself was nothing special, there were a couple of brief talks about what how the EU functions, and what committees and projects Nessa is involved in. I did get to the Mickey Mouse bar in the parliament, named sarcastically after Margret Thatcher’s remark that it is “a mickey mouse parliament.” For me though, the best part of the tour was the spindly security guard with a side fringe and a pencil moustache, whose security tag read TECHNO in Helvetica. It emerged that all the tags have TECHNO on their back, but he looked like he belonged in Dancecentrum in Struttgart spinning kraftwerk remixes, not looking after the security of a supranational institution. But then, European Brussels belies the expectation of the drab and boring eurocrat.
The best example of this is what happens on Thursday nights on Place du Luxembourg, right outside the entrance to the European Parliament. At the end of the long work day, interns and assistants will gather at the grassy square surrounding a monument of to the 9th century British-Belgian industrialist John Cockerill, and chill with a few cans, again, in full view of the European Parliament. The strongest condemnation or reaction to this from the Belgian or EU authorities is rather timid “please keep Brussels clean” postering campaign. One Irish parliamentary assistant explained to me that the way the work week is set up in the Parliament is that Monday to Thursday is incredibly busy while Friday is slower, so “when you come out and the sun is coming down, you see around thirty of forty people you know and there is good music coming from the bars, it can be one of the nicest aspects of the job. If you’re in Trinity, it’s like going to the Pav.” Obviously the continental attitudes towards drinking culture are much different than ours, and they’re more laid back and moderate in the way they drink, but it still seems surprisingly relaxed, and grown up in a way you don’t often
see here. It could even be argued that the interns and assistants should be allowed the leeway given the amount of work they put in. I was told that “if you scratch any surface in Brussels, you’ll find 100 interns” and that it can be hard to tell who you’re communicating with via email, because you’re as likely if not more so to be talking to an intern as the actual person you’re trying to get through to. Traditionally the intern would just make copies and coffee, but that has changed in the last ten years or so, and especially now. Since so many interns are fully educated and qualified, they find themselves with more responsibilities; they can find themselves doing research, writing speeches for MEPs, organizing and attending meetings, and helping MEPs organize events. Understandably then, this is a game for the young. “You could only do the job if you liked it” said Shane Griffin, assistant to Nessa Childers. “The job really ebbs and flows. Sometimes you have time to catch up on a lot of work that’s piled up
in your inbox, and other days you can work straight through from 8am to 9pm.” For that reason it’s very uncommon to find assistants or interns who aren’t in their mid-
twenties.
There is an inbuilt social life that goes with the job, especially among Irish assistants and interns. They all sit together in the cafeteria (where a lady skipped me in the line, nearly destroying my faith in the European Union), and hang out. They even have a GAA team: Belgium GAA (Their blog is called Keeping it Lit). Set up by Cork native Dave Barrett around five years ago, he, instead of melding into Brussels life, created an effective mini-Ireland within Brussels. If you were going to go to live in Brussels, one call to this man would set you up with an apartment and a social life in 24 hours, just through his Irish network. Naturally, the fact that assistants and interns spend time together socially shouldn’t be surprising, but the fact that they do smoothens the political process. There are 736 MEPs, so there needs to be a lot of collaboration to get anything done, and it’s the assistants and the interns who have to go between each other’s offices to try and set up the meetings. It’s inevitably easier to work with people you’re friends with, and in the case of the Irish, most MEPs are left/right centrist, so everyone can get along, if with debate.
It is true though that there has been a noticeable swing to the right in Europe, and it is affecting EU politics, because the politicians voted in are right wing. Shane explained
that “the austerity programmes and current approach to the crisis are coming from conservative policy because the parliament and commission are conservative. People
don’t see the EU as politics as normal, but that’s exactly what it is. The centre left propose different things to centre right, who run the council. It isn’t a case of north vs south or east vs west, but left vs right.” Part of the problem is that there is a sense of distance from the EU because the EU doesn’t do much to defend itself. When people criticise the national government, there will be ministers on the radio the next morning justifying their actions, but you can pretty much say anything about the EU and it will remain silent. It needs to communicate why we’re better off with it, now more than ever. I didn’t get the impression that there was any intentional effort to sway us when we were there, but why else would they have invited us?
After the tour was over we went to dinner and then to Delerium, a bar that has a phone book sized menu of over 2000 different Belgian beers. On the way back to the hotel through the opulent European quarter, beautiful but the consequence of the worst kind of colonialism, there was a grand piano mysteriously sitting in the outdoor corridor. I played the only song I know, the theme from tetris, and then moved along. This apparently was normal in Brussels; I was told it’s usually futile to try and understand most of the seemingly random goings on in the city. This was Euro-Brussels though, a world away from Belgian Brussels, or anywhere else.
