The 164^th Plenary session marked the inaugural meeting of the 2025-2030 CoR mandate. The session began on Wednesday 19^th February in the European Parliament’s Hemicycle with a speech from outgoing CoR President Vasco Cordeiro, in which he strongly urged that the position of CoR President be made a full-time role to strengthen the institution’s position within inter-institutional discussions.

Following the outgoing President’s statement, members were allowed to debate with the President of the European Council,  António Costa, a former CoR member. The debate focused on the ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as the European Council’s recently adopted Strategic Agenda 2024-2029.

After this debate the plenary adjourned for the night.

The plenary session restarted on Thursday 20^th at 9am with the election of the members of the Bureau, the election of the President and First-Vice President. The Irish delegation nominated the head of delegation Cllr. Gillian Coughlan and Cllr. Jimmy McClearn to the Bureau, while the plenary unanimously elected former deputy mayor of Budapest, Kata Tüttő (PES), as President and President of the Spanish region of Andalucia, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla as First Vice-President. The President and First Vice-President will rotate after two and a half years.

Starting in the afternoon, the plenary was presented with a report on the impact of CoR opinions. The headline from this report is that in 2024, the CoR adopted 53 opinions and 4 resolutions, which is slightly lowered compared to previous years (68 in 201, 63 in 2022 and 59 in 2023). However, the report highlights that it is higher than in 2019, a year which is comparable to the EU inter-institutional cycle. Ireland had three opinions adopted in 2024.

Following the adoption of the CoR Commission remits for the new mandate, the plenary held a debate with Commissioner with responsibility for Cohesion Policy Raffaele Fitto. Speaking during the debate Irish Delegation member Cllr Declan McDonnell urged that “Cohesion policy takes a bottom-up approach with more decentralisation of funds”.

An hour later, Thibaut Guignard presented the first opinion of this mandate “How post-27 Leader and CLLD programming could contribute to better implementation of the long-term vision for the EU’s rural areas”. This opinion seeks to address that despite rural regions making up 80% of the EU’s surface area, they can often experience a growing feeling of marginalization, which the opinion posits leads to euroscepticism.

Next, the plenary held a highly topical debate with Europe’s first Commissioner for Housing and energy Dan Jørgensen to discuss Local and Regional Authorities tackling the housing crisis. Despite indications from multiple Irish members to speak on this topic the debate was cut short for time.

Following this there was the presentation of the Paweł Adamowicz Award in recognition of his extraordinary leadership and fostering civic engagement to Vitaliy Klitschko Mayor of Kyiv and to Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, Palestinian and Israeli community leaders working on reconciliation between the communities.

Concluding the inaugural plenary session members were asked to adopt Fernando Lopez Miras’ ‘A Strong European Defence Industry’ and Oszkár Seszták’s ‘Supporting SMEs in regional value chains – fostering the proximity economy’. Both were adopted.

The next plenary session will take place in Brussels on the 2^nd and 3^rd of March.