EU: In the future Irish diplomats will be able to choose whether they want to work for the national service or opt for a European diplomatic service.
This new service, which only made it into the new European Constitution at the last minute, will back up the powerful EU foreign minister, who will be responsible for external representation of the Union - a wide-ranging brief that also covers trade and development.
Although work on the corps officially only began on October 29th, some capitals began to look at just what a European diplomatic service might mean long before last month.
Foreign policy chief Mr Javier Solana, who will become the EU's foreign minister once the constitution is in place - at the earliest in 2006 - has already set up a task force to examine the issue.
The aim of the service is to make sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing across the range of EU policies. At the moment, EU external action is a hotchpotch of national foreign ministries, Commission delegations, an EU foreign policy chief (responsible for diplomacy) and an EU external relations commissioner (responsible for aid).
This has led Mr Solana to remark that the around 40,000 EU diplomats, in comparison to the 10,000 US diplomats, have not made the EU four times more efficient.
A strong EU foreign minister backed up by a large diplomatic service would, in the eyes of its advocates, "continue to bring foreign policies closer together".
But the idea is not without its problems. The prospect of a turf war between the three power axes that will be involved in staffing the service - the Council, the European Commission and member-states - is already causing headaches in Brussels.
Each part of that triangle wants to make sure it makes up the biggest part of the service so it can control it. The other main question is how big the diplomatic service should be - Mr Solana has said it could contain up to 7,000 officials - but estimates range from a small service of a couple of hundred officials to one containing 20,000.
Some large member-states are keen to see that it does not rival their own foreign services. Britain, particularly, has reservations. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw notoriously remarked last year that the 128 Commission delegations around the world, which will form part of the service, are staffed with "odd-bods".
On top of this, countries like Germany want to make sure that representation in the service is proportional to population size.
"There is simply no chance that Malta sends the same amount of diplomats as Germany," said an EU official.
This is something that makes smaller countries nervous, with diplomats wondering how representative of all member-states the service will be.
But for countries like Ireland there could also be some real political benefits from taking part. "Small countries could benefit from having access to high-level documents though EU channels - information they wouldn't normally get because they are too small," said an EU insider.
Talks are also under way to see if the EU could eventually have its own representation at the United Nations.
Further down the road, member-states may consider scrapping some of the around 600 bilateral embassies that they keep with one another - or closing some embassies in favour of a single EU mission.
But first, other issues have to be cleared up, such as what happens if an important diplomat in the euro-corps - perhaps an ambassador - comes from a country which opposes an action being taken on behalf of a majority of member-states.
While these questions have still to be thoroughly examined, EU officials are generally quite sure that divisions such as those caused over the war in Iraq can only be partially helped by an EU diplomatic service.
"In the case of Iraq or relations with the US, there is no magic formula. No institutional formula will bring you an insurance policy against that," said a Council official.