The Irish EU presidency will make one last attempt to get agreement on a common community patent, the Tánaiste, Ms Harney, told a press conference here yesterday evening.

Attempts to reach agreement on this issue were unsuccessful during the Italian presidency but Ms Harney and her officials will hold a series of bilateral meetings ahead of next month's formal meeting of EU industry and competitiveness ministers in Brussels to see if a deal can be struck.

The community patent would offer a common mechanism to protect the work of EU researchers, but efforts stretching back more than a decade have failed to reach agreement and the Irish presidency has so far not been able to break the logjam. "I do think we can overestimate how important it is to reach agreement in this area," Ms Harney told yesterday evening's press conference in Dromoland. The presidency was "hopeful" rather than confident of reaching agreement, she said.

She had earlier told ministers and delegates that it was difficult for the EU to say it was serious about innovation if progress could not be made on this issue. The key blockages to a deal are differences about how the common patent should be translated in different languages and the legal status of these translations.

EU industry and research leaders have long called for a community patent to protect their research.

Speaking at yesterday's meeting, Dr Max Dietrich Kley, chairman and chief executive of Infineon (Germany) - a semi-conductor company owned by Siemens - said the accelerated introduction of such a patent was essential. Every day lost to the ongoing disputes and arguments on the issue "constitutes a further threat to valuable jobs", he argued.