The increased turnout in last month's Nice referendum showed that the importance of debating European issues had "registered" with the ordinary people, the chairman of the National Forum on Europe, Senator Maurice Hayes, said at Dublin Castle yesterday.
The forum has entered a new phase of its deliberations with the first of a series of meetings about the Convention on the Future of Europe, which is currently sitting in Brussels. Describing it as "an intensive review", the chairman said he hoped the forum would have an input to the convention.
"The convention is now moving ahead at considerable speed," he said. A draft treaty was expected to emerge by July at the latest and an Intergovernmental Conference would then be established to discuss it.
The Minister of State for European Affairs, Mr Dick Roche, who replaced Mr Ray MacSharry as the Government's representative on the convention two months ago, said he had noticed "an astonishing pick-up of pace" in its work. "The effort to press the issue along artificially fast could have very negative results," he warned. It would be a "catastrophic error" if the rush meant that the incoming member-states were excluded from the debate.
While some of the larger member-states regarded the rotating EU presidency as "bothersome", Mr Roche said it had "a very beneficial effect". He hoped that through the forum and the European Affairs Committee of the Oireachtas, there would be wide public involvement in the convention debate.
The Minister expressed reservations about moves to change the EU's name to "United States of Europe" or "United Europe". He said the public was "quite comfortable and familiar" with "European Union" and there was no enthusiasm for a change.
Dr Kirsty Hughes from the Brussels-based think-tank, the Centre for European Policy Studies, questioned whether the convention was really getting to grips with the key issues. She highlighted its failure to address head-on the integrationist versus intergovernmental debate on the future of Europe.
The convention had been doing "very well" so far in carrying out a major reassessment of the EU but it was doing "less well" in tackling the power balance between the institutions, particularly the Commission and the Council. The larger member-states were having this debate, but not the convention.