IRELAND: The Government is continuing to prepare for a referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty while consulting with other EU leaders in advance of next week's EU Summit in Brussels, a Government spokesman said last night.
The Taoiseach met the president of the European Council, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, on Friday as EU leaders prepare for a difficult summit in the wake of the French and Dutch rejections of the treaty. He also had phone conversations in the last few days with the French president, Jacques Chirac; the British prime minister, Tony Blair; and the Polish and Danish leaders.
While Britain is expected to press for the halting of the process of ratifying the constitutional treaty, Ireland is among those not supporting this position.
"We want to see the EU constitution ratified," a Government spokesman said yesterday. "It can't be cherry-picked, and there can't be an a la carte approach: that won't work," he said.
The Government has set no date for an Irish referendum, leaving open the possibility that it could support the idea of pausing or extending the period during which ratification must take place.
The current position is that the treaty must be ratified by November next year. If it is ratified by at least 20, but not all, member states by then, a special summit is to be called to decide what to do. This timescale may be re-opened at the Brussels summit late next week.
The Government spokesman said that the referendum results from France and the Netherlands represented a setback.
"It [ the constitution] is clearly not in plain-sailing mode, but the Government's objective is as it was, so we are continuing to plan for a referendum here."
The Minister for Social Affairs Seamus Brennan said last night that the Government did not believe it should make a unilateral decision on whether to proceed with ratification. Speaking on RTÉ's The Week in Politics last night he said the Taoiseach would be attending the European Council meeting meeting next week, and it was incumbent on EU leaders to assess the situation there. The Taoiseach would bring to that meeting the Government's view that the Constitution is "rescuable".