POLAND/IRELAND: The Polish Prime Minister, Mr Leszek Miller, will meet the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in Dublin tomorrow to discuss ways of breaking the deadlock over vote- weighting that brought down last month's EU summit in Brussels.
Mr Miller's visit, postponed from December after he was involved in a serious helicopter crash, comes after he warned that anyone who expects Poland to hold its tongue for the sake of compromise was "mistaken".
"I'd rather Poland was active than just standing around in a corner taking orders from someone else," he told the New York Times this week.
But a corner is exactly where many analysts see Poland right now, thanks to its so-called "Nice or death" summit strategy to retain its 25 votes at the Council of Ministers, just two votes short of Germany, despite having a population less than half the size.
Berlin and Paris are calling for decisions to be passed if approved by a majority of the 25 countries, provided they represented at least 60 per cent of EU population. Mr Miller and his strategists say "Nice or death" wasn't simply about Poland defending its own position, but about defending a certain way of doing politics in the EU which, until now, held larger countries in check. "After Brussels there was a sense here that it was good that Poland didn't give in. But even supporters of Miller now feel that that we should do something to move things ahead and that simply blocking the constitution isn't good enough, that it will in fact be harmful," says Mr Jacek Jucharczyk, director for programming of the Institute for Public Affairs (ISP) in Warsaw.
The priority for Warsaw now is a face-saving solution that breaks the deadlock without giving the impression in Poland that Mr Miller has ceded too much to France and Germany.
The Irish presidency will play a key role in brokering any deal with Poland, a country with a tremendous sympathy for Ireland.
"From a political and historical point of view it would be much more comfortable if the agreement between Irish and Poles rather than the Poles and the Germans," says Mr Jucharczyk of the ISP.
The outcome of the treaty negotiations could make or break Mr Miller's career: he leads a scandal-tainted minority administration and support for his SLD party is running at just 18 per cent, the same as the rate of unemployment.