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A superconductor connected to a normal metal by a tunnel junction induces a superconducting pair amplitude in the normal side. This proximity effect is profoundly modified by the Coulomb interaction: charging effects caused by the small capacitance of the junctions suppress the tunneling of electrons and therefore the proximity effect. Both effects can be modulated by means of a gate voltage and show an interesting even-odd asymmetry due to parity effects. This offers the possibility to modulate supercurrents. We use an effective Ginzburg-Landau formulation to calculate the critical current and the T c enhancement of a normal wire with a finite pairing interaction connected to superconducting islands.