The Government faces 51 separate legal cases related to its failure to adopt legislation governing Europe's internal market. A report published by EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy yesterday shows that Ireland is ranked 19th out of 25 member-states in terms of transposing EU directives into law.

The Internal Market Scoreboard indicates that Ireland is one of eight EU member-states that fail to reach a target of transposing 98.5 per cent of EU directives into national law on time.

In the six months to the end of December 2005, Ireland's "transposition deficit" widened 0.2 per cent and now stands at 1.8 per cent, which ranks it ahead of just five states: the Czech Republic, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Luxembourg.

The scoreboard benchmarks member-states' performance in implementing EU directives to harmonise rules governing Europe's internal market. Under EU law, member-states must transpose directives within a certain period, but in practice states often delay implementing controversial laws.

The report shows that Ireland has failed to transpose 30 directives related to the internal market and in one case is more than two years late in adopting legislation. The average delay in the Republic for transposing EU directives is nine months and Ireland faces 51 infringement proceedings from the European Commission.

Across the EU, on average only 1.6 per cent of internal market directives for which the implementation deadline has passed are not written into national laws, a fall from 1.9 per cent on the July 2005 figure, with the 10 new member-states performing better than the 15 original member-states.

Luxembourg and Greece are the two worst performers in the survey, reporting transposition deficits of 4.4 per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively.

"I encourage member-states to build on this progress and urge those lagging behind to redouble their efforts," Mr McCreevy said.

Noel Treacy, Minister of State for European Affairs at the Departments of the Taoiseach and Foreign Affairs, defended the Government's performance yesterday. "The latest scoreboard records the position of Ireland on November 30th, 2005," he said.

"Since then, we have reduced our transposition deficit to 22 directives, giving a deficit rating of 1.35 per cent as of February 20th, 2006. This is well below the Lisbon Agenda target of 1.5 per cent and our intention is to keep reducing this deficit."