Madam, - For the next six months, I will preside over the monthly meetings of the Council of EU Economic and Finance Ministers - or Ecofin, as it is called.
In addition, I am also the chair of the group of 12 euro area finance ministers, known as the Eurogroup. The EU Commission attends both the Ecofin and the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank attends the Eurogroup only. These regular meetings allow for informal exchanges of views on economic and budgetary matters of common concern to the euro area.
The Ecofin meetings, on the other hand, are formal legislative events for all the 15 (or 25 as it soon will be),with full publication of the outcome of the business transacted.
The Eurogroup meeting takes place on the evening before the monthly Ecofin. After both meetings, the president of both groups holds a full press conference assisted by the EU Commissioners with responsibility for the economic and financial areas in the Commission.
In hosting such conferences I am, of course, representing the EU and expressing the positions and sentiments of EU Finance Minister colleagues as a body. I am not there as the Irish Minister for Finance to articulate an Irish position, though I do receive questions addressed to me in that regard.
To judge by a recent article and Editorial in your paper, this distinction between my EU Presidency role and duty and the duty of expressing an Irish national position appears to be confused in some minds.
When I say at such press conferences that, for example, there was little support among Ecofin Ministers for the Commission's position on certain items, what I am doing is conveying the sense of the Ecofin view. I am not conveying an Irish perspective but an EU one, although in many cases these will coincide.
To say - wrongly, in my view, in the case in question - that I am not acting in Ireland's interest or that I should champion the Commission viewpoint against the Council on Ireland's behalf, is to fail to appreciate my role as president of the Eurogroup and the Ecofin.
I was further intrigued by the claim in one article that I was not ad idem with my Ecofin colleagues and that my "brusque manner" would put off my colleagues.
My role as president is to listen attentively to colleagues, to try to find agreement on what can be thorny issues and to move ahead with the work and the agenda of the Council. That is what I will seek to do - and did successfully, I hope, at my first meetings this month.
All I ask is that commentators recognise when I am wearing my presidency hat and when I am not. - Yours, etc.,
CHARLIE McCREEVY, TD, Minister for Finance, Dáil Éireann, Dublin 2.