The Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has rejected claims that his opposition to the appointment of a European Public Prosecutor is based on a "Eurosceptic" approach.
The Convention on the Future of Europe has proposed appointing the prosecutor to investigate and pursue cases of alleged fraud against the EU budget through the courts of the member-states.
The Minister told the Forum on Europe at Dublin Castle yesterday that he was opposed to the idea because of concerns that it would undermine the system of common law which existed in Ireland, the UK, and two states on the verge of EU membership, Malta and Cyprus.
Mr Charles Flanagan (Fine Gael) said that mutual recognition of court decisions would inevitably give rise to a common standard. He said that the Minister's philosophical stance "masks a certain Euroscepticism" which put him in the camp of the British Conservative Party.
The Minister replied that his point of view was shared by the British Labour Party. His views were not conservative, but were fundamentally civil-libertarian, and to taint him with British Tory Eurosceptic views was unfair.
In his opening speech, the Minister had said that he was in favour of other measures being taken to enhance co-operation between member-states on the administration of justice. But he added: "Criminal law is different from other areas of co-operation."
That was the reason why such co-operation had operated up to now on an intergovernmental basis. Issues of sovereignty, legitimacy, democratic accountability and historical and cultural acceptability were involved.
There were "two very different legal traditions" within the EU, the common law and civil law systems.
It was "critically important" that the different legal traditions be respected and accommodated in any measures taken.
The principal EU strategy up to now was mutual recognition of judicial decisions rather than attempting to create "one single system of criminal law for the whole of the European Union".
States which operated the civil law system would say of common law states: we will uphold your decisions and we expect you to uphold ours. This was reflected in the European Common Arrest Warrant.
There was a philosophical issue at the heart of this: "What kind of EU do you want?"
Clearly, it was more than an economic community with a political superstructure and less than a full-blown federal state.
The question was whether we wanted to create an EU which had the power to "investigate, try, punish and imprison its citizens", or leave that to the member-states.
The idea of a European Public Prosecutor was the sole remaining part of the Corpus Juris project, which was "not yet dead" and sought to establish a federal criminal system for Europe.