EUROPEAN DIARY: The press room is half empty these days and the early air of excitement has evaporated but after a stilted start, the Convention on the Future of Europe is finally getting down to serious work. Alongside regular plenary sessions, when all 105 members may speak, the convention has set up six working groups to look at key issues ranging from the role of national parliaments to the economic governance of the EU.
The convention's president, Mr Valery Giscard d'Estaing, opposed the idea of working groups at first, favouring instead a leading role for his praesidium in setting the agenda. But he was persuaded that the best way to give convention members a sense of ownership over the process was to allow sub-groups of up to 30 members to tease out the most difficult problems.
Both the Government's representative, Mr Ray MacSharry, and Ireland's member of the praesidium, Mr John Bruton, are on the working group on economic governance. This group will look at how the Stability and Growth Pact might be improved and will discuss the future of economic policy co-ordination in the EU. The Government is determined that Brussels should not gain an enhanced role in influencing national budgets and will resist any move towards tax harmonisation.
Mr Bruton takes a more flexible approach but he too believes that national governments must remain free to set tax rates at any level they choose.
The Dublin MEP, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, is on the working group dealing with the role of national parliaments in the EU.
Many members of the convention believe that involving national parliaments more closely in EU decisions could help to bridge the gap between Brussels and EU citizens.
Mr MacSharry and Mr Bruton both spoke at the convention last week on the role of parliaments and both argued that national parliamentarians could be given an enhanced role without upsetting the present institutional balance.
Although the working groups deal with a broad range of issues, none has yet been established to discuss the most important institutional question - the balance of power between the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, where national governments meet.
Some large member-states, led by Britain and France, want to replace the present, six-month, rotating presidency with a more durable system led by a President of the Council who would be elected for up to five years.
Austria's foreign minister Ms Benita Ferrero-Waldner spoke for many smaller states this week when she said that all member-states should continue to have their turn in holding the presidency.
"Equality of all member-states has been and still is the basis for the smooth functioning of the EU," she said.
New working groups will be established later this year and the convention's praesidium is confident that all important questions will be discussed in depth. There is little sign, however, that the convention members have come up with many new ideas for resolving the problem that gave birth to the convention itself - the EU's perceived lack of democratic accountability.
Most of the convention's members are experienced politicians who value institutional efficiency as highly as democratic transparency. Few are likely to support Prof Brendan O'Leary's radical suggestion in this newspaper yesterday that all future treaty changes should be approved by an EU-wide referendum and national referendums in all member-states.
Some member-states, such as Germany, have constitutional limits on the use of referendums. But a more compelling argument against the use of direct democracy is the fact that many changes that are now popular, such as the introduction of the euro, would almost certainly have been rejected by voters in at least one member-state.
Enlargement would almost certainly be impossible if referendums were required and most European politicians are convinced that introducing direct democracy would be a recipe for paralysis.
None the less, the popular sense of alienation from the EU that Prof O'Leary identifies is undoubtedly real and if the convention cannot find an effective way of combating it, it will fail in its primary objective of giving Europe back to its citizens.