We’re ideally placed to chair EU budget negotiations, says Irish Minister of State

Home Shows Talking Europe To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: Talking Europe © France 24 12:27 Issued on: 18/09/2026 - 17:17 From the show Ireland is managing a jam-packed agenda as the current holder of the rotating presidency of the EU. We caught up with the country’s Minister of State for European Affairs, Thomas Byrne, who was in Strasbourg for the 2026 State of the Union speech and debate with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. We discussed key points from that address, such as a proposed ban on social media access for children, which Ireland is keen to push forward with during its EU presidency. On talks coming up on the 2028-2034 EU budget, Byrne says that Ireland is ideally positioned to be a broker because, while it is now a net contributor to the budget, "we were until relatively recently a net recipient of EU funds, so we’ve seen both sides of the picture." "We tend to be quite pragmatic about all of this," Byrne says. Programme produced by Perrine Desplats, Florine Hausfater and Agnès Le Cossec.