In an effort to remove definitively any controversy about corporate tax harmonisation, the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, will today seek to incorporate Wednesday's Anglo-German declaration on the issue into the final declaration of the EU summit.
The move, which will be supported by the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, is seen by the British as a way of taking the issue off the agenda and calming the frenzied coverage of European affairs that is seriously jeopardising the Blair government's softly-softly selling of the single currency.
That imperative appears to have been taken on board by more than the Germans. The President of the European Council, Austria's Chancellor, Mr Viktor Klima, set the tone for the debate on economic co-ordination with the insistence that they would be discussing "tax co-ordination", not uniform tax rates.
Affirming Britain's and Germany's willingness to work together to combat harmful tax competition, the declaration, however, ruled out any question of harmonising or seeking to set a minimum corporation tax rate or harmonising income tax. Mr Ahern, who spoke last in the debate, said there was clearly no support for uniform rates of corporation tax, but there was support for co-ordination of policy. He backed the idea of a major European Commission study of the real underlying rates in member-states.
Tax competition and competitiveness were a global issue facing all member-states "from Donegal to Morocco", he said, referring to the Fruit of the Loom job losses.
In his contribution the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, called for an intensification of work on the code of conduct on "unfair" tax competition - intersectoral tax breaks within member-states - with a view to reaching conclusions about some 90 potentially harmful schemes by June's Cologne summit.
The Italian Prime Minister, Mr Massimo d'Alema, alone pressed for further tax harmonisation.
For other leaders the central preoccupation of the economic debate was an attempt to beef up the Union's action against unemployment. The leaders agreed to endorse a report from the Commission which updates guidelines for labour market reform agreed in Luxembourg last December.
While the guidelines set broad parameters for national approaches to reform, the French and Germans today will urge the council to accept an amendment that requires member-states to set quantified targets for many of the guidelines to be used as yardsticks against which progress can be measured.
Welcoming the initiative the Economic Affairs Commissioner, Mr Yves Thibault de Silguy, said the proposals merely put flesh on the approach agreed in Luxembourg, which already was bearing fruit in reducing unemployment.
An additional 1.7 million jobs have been created in the EU in the last year, bringing unemployment in October down below 10 per cent for the first time since 1992.
The summit also discussed the external representation of the euro and the need to step up work on reforming the international financial system.