THE GOVERNMENT is still working with its EU partners to a Lisbon Treaty schedule that implies an autumn referendum, notwithstanding calls in recent days for an earlier vote, according to diplomatic sources and the Czech EU presidency.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin met the Czech deputy prime minister and EU affairs minister Alexandr Vondra in Cork yesterday for an hour and a half for discussions that ranged over the Lisbon Treaty, transatlantic relations, and the forthcoming emergency summit on the economic crisis, scheduled for March 1st in Brussels.
Speaking afterwards, Mr Vondra, who emphasised that the decision on a date “must be a sovereign decision”, said he felt that, as yet, no decision had been made to go early, and that we “have to prepare a decision to be made in June at the latest”.
The December European summit set the June summit as the point at which the Government would have to acquire approval for the texts on the legally binding guarantees that it is seeking on the treaty.
Agreement in June, after the European Parliament elections, would allow the Government to organise a second Lisbon referendum in October, ahead of the replacement of the European Commission.
Mr Vondra said it was his impression that the texts of the legal guarantees, which are being prepared in consultation between the Government and the EU council of ministers’ legal secretariat, are not yet ready for circulation.
An Irish diplomatic source suggested that there is already some clarity on the scope and language of the assurances being sought on social issues such as abortion and on taxation, but that decisions still need be taken on the scope of wording of the neutrality/defence guarantee.
Mr Vondra, a former ambassador to the US and one-time prominent dissident before Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, said that the March emergency summit would address two key issues: the need for member-states to co-ordinate their attempts to “defreeze credit lines” of banks across the EU, and the need to ensure that the actions of some member states did not adversely affect others.
Europe had to avoid the “growing temptation of protectionism”, he warned.
Co-ordination of economic policies is particularly important at this time, he said. Integration of the single market remains a key challenge.
Ministers would also prepare for what the Czech presidency hopes will be a first EU-US summit in Prague when President Barack Obama comes to Europe in April for important G20 and Nato anniversary meetings.
Asked about the Czech attitude to the Lisbon Treaty – set to pass through the lower house of parliament this week, the Senate in April, and then to await the signature of President Vaclav Klaus, probably after the Irish referendum – Mr Vondra acknowledges a Czech “scepticism of grand designs”.
“Nothing is black and white,” he says, the Czechs are “essentially a pragmatic people” who will weigh the pros and cons.
“It is not a treaty we like every paragraph of,” he says, but he believes a majority will see it as positive.
It is a compromise – “compromise is better than giving a free right to national states when the bigger states will not take into account interests and rights of smaller states”.
