Ireland has entered the final week of its drive to secure a deal on the European Union’s capital markets overhaul, with member states still divided over the central question of supervision. Finance ministers meet in Luxembourg on October 9, the deadline Dublin set itself on taking over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union on July 1.
The Market Integration and Supervision Package, known in Brussels as MISP, was tabled by the European Commission on December 4, 2025. It would amend 14 regulations and give the Paris-based European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) direct oversight of large trading venues, clearing houses, central securities depositories and crypto-asset service providers.
The Irish presidency circulated a first full round of compromise amendments at the start of September and sent further texts to national experts in the closing days of the month. Officials met on September 28 and 29 to examine a near-final negotiating position.
Supervision is the obstacle. Member states remain split over the criteria that would make a firm significant enough to fall under ESMA, over the governance of its planned executive board and over who pays for the new system.
Luxembourg has led the resistance, with Finance Minister Gilles Roth telling ministers on July 10 that centralisation ran counter to the single market. Sweden, Hungary and the Czech Republic have made similar arguments, echoing the alarm among smaller countries when the Commission first revived the project in 2025.
The bloc’s six largest economies, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, have pushed the other way, calling for a wider transfer of powers and a stronger ESMA executive board.
Ireland’s own position is an awkward one. Dublin resisted centralised supervision for years, fearing funds and market firms would relocate to Paris, and now chairs the talks it once helped to slow.
Tánaiste and Finance Minister Simon Harris, who will chair the Luxembourg meeting, said on July 2 that any deal would require all countries “giving a bit”. He has also told MEPs that postponing the deadline would not guarantee a better outcome.
The case made in Brussels is a comparative one. The Commission said the market capitalisation of EU exchanges stood at 73 per cent of gross domestic product in 2024 against 270 per cent in the United States, and that roughly €10 trillion of household money sits in low-yield deposits.
Ursula von der Leyen pressed the case for the savings and investments union in her State of the Union address on September 16, presenting it as part of a wider effort to knit together fragmented capital markets. Whether ministers deliver it, after a decade in which the project has repeatedly stalled, will become clear in Luxembourg.
