Internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy has promised that any new EU services directive will include safeguards to ensure employers cannot use it to avoid paying the minimum wage.

Speaking in Davos, where he is attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, he told The Irish Times he was willing to amend the directive he inherited from his predecessor, Frits Bolkestein, to ensure this was the case.

"If it needs more copper-fastening to make sure that doesn't take place, I'd be willing and I think everyone else would be willing to do that," he said. "The Bolkestein services directive was not meant to do that . . . but if these things need strengthening, I'm sure we can find an accommodation."

But Mr McCreevy's position on the directive was blamed for the rejection of the draft EU constitution in referendums in France and the Netherlands last year. Speaking in Dublin yesterday, former Danish prime minister and chairman of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, Mr Poul Rasmussen, said: "The people are saying no to Europe because there are too many McCreevys in Europe."

The European Parliament is due to vote next month on the directive, which critics fear will allow low-cost service providers from poorer member states to push down wages and standards in more prosperous EU countries.

MEPs are expected to table numerous amendments and Mr McCreevy has acknowledged that the directive, in its original form, "hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell" of being adopted.

Mr McCreevy said that, if the major forces in parliament agreed on a revised directive, it would have "a fairer wind" when it comes up for consideration by the 25 member states in the Council of Ministers.

"Hopefully, the different forces in the parliament will be able to come together and get the broadest possible consensus. When that comes through, I've always promised to be as accommodating as possible.

"One proviso is that I don't want to end up with such a changed directive that it won't achieve a lot. There won't be the services directive by the Prodi commission and Mr Bolkestein but hopefully we'll have a directive on services," he said.

Mr McCreevy said there was no link between the services directive and the current debate in Ireland on the reintroduction of work permits for citizens of the 10 new member-states.

He said statistics did not bear out the assertion that immigrants from central and eastern Europe were displacing Irish workers.

"In fact, the opposite seems to be the very thing. Ireland proportionately has taken more workers from the new countries that joined in 2004 than any other country.

"All of those people must have found work, although not all of them stayed there because there would be some people going back. And yet the Irish employment rate is at an all-time high. In the year April 2004 to April 2005, the Irish unemployment rate was in the order of 4.3 per cent. That's practically full employment. All these people have been absorbed, so it is not being borne out by the statistics," he said.

Mr McCreevy insisted that Ireland's experience of lifting employmnet restrictions on foreign workers was overwhelmingly positive and that immigrants were already benefiting the economy and would continue to do so.