Biography | Sharon McGuinness — ENVI Heard the ECHA Candidate in This Strasbourg Building

On 22 June 2022 the Management Board of the European Chemicals Agency selected Sharon McGuinness as its next Executive Director.

The appointment procedure still required a hearing in the European Parliament.

ENVI coordinators scheduled that exchange for the evening of 4 July 2022.

The minutes place it in room WEISS N1.3 in Strasbourg, with remote participation allowed.

The slot ran from 20:30 to 21:00.

Paul Krajnik, then chair of the Management Board, had already said the board looked forward to the Parliament's view.

After the hearing the coordinators recorded a unanimous decision.

They supported her nomination and asked the committee chair to write to the President of the Parliament recommending formal appointment by the board.

The building that holds that room is the Louise Weiss complex, the Parliament's Strasbourg seat since 1999.

It stands at the junction of the Ill and the Marne-Rhine Canal.

The five-year term of an ECHA Executive Director can be renewed once.

The person they were hearing was still Chief Executive of Ireland's Health and Safety Authority, a post she had held since 1 July 2018.

She had sat on ECHA's own Management Board from 2014 to 2021 and chaired it from October 2016 to October 2020.

The Strasbourg evening did not start the job.

It cleared the last parliamentary gate before a December start in Helsinki.

Photo: FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons