My guest is Barry Andrews.

Barry Andrews.

Barry Andrews is a member of the European Parliament from Ireland's Fiona Foil Party and sits in the centre-left Renew Europe group.

He's been an MEP since February 2020.

Welcome to the podcast, Barry.

Thanks for having me on, Paul.

Right.

Well, we're going to get cracking.

I want to try and cover quite a lot of ground in the next 25 minutes or so. We're going to talk with your permission about the EU-K summit, which took place this time last week, last Monday. The role maybe the European Parliament in keeping those lines of communication open between the EU and the UK.

What your feelings are now, since you're into your second term, as an MEP, about what we call

the new European Parliament.

And then just to remind people that the island will hold the presidency of the EU within just

over a year, July 2026, and any ideas and insights you might have about how your country will be conducting that presidency?

So let's get cracking. It's only a week old, I know, but what are your kind of main takeaways from the quite actually historic EU-UK summit this time last week?

Well, I've been involved in the UK relations since I got elected in February

2020. So I've seen really pretty, you know, very dark times, very difficult relations where

trust completely broke down, where the UK were embarked upon, you know, specific breaches of

international law. Yeah. Limited breaches of international law.

To the position where we are last week.

And, yeah, you know, people are critical of it, that it's a little bit thin on detail.

There's a lot of aspiration.

There's a lot of working towards.

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