The Government has welcomed the latest draft of an EU constitution that guarantees each member-state's right to nominate a member of the European Commission, writes Denis Staunton in Brussels
The President of the Convention on the Future of Europe, Mr Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, said yesterday the draft would form the basis of a consensus to be agreed next week.
Mr Giscard has dropped a plan to limit the size of the Commission to 15 members and has scaled back the role of a new President of the European Council.
But the draft retains a proposal to replace the present system of qualified majority voting with a "double majority" - a majority of member-states that must also represent at least 60 per cent of the population of the EU.
Each member-state would continue to nominate a commissioner, but from January 1st, 2009, only an inner core of 15 commissioners would vote at Commission meetings.
These voting rights would be rotated on the basis of strict equality among member-states, so that in an EU of 30 member-states, each would have a full commissioner for 10 out of each 15 years.
The Minister for Europe, Mr Dick Roche, said the deal on the Commission represented an advance on the Nice Treaty, which envisages a reduced Commission once the EU has 27 member-states.
"The general principles for institutional reform set out by the small states have been quite clearly adhered to," he said.
Mr Roche said he had some questions about the organisation of the Council of Ministers and suggested that the case for changing the calculation of a qualified majority had not been made persuasively.
But he praised the "common sense" that informed yesterday's draft and predicted that the Convention would succeed in approving a text in time for this month's meeting of EU leaders in Thessaloniki.
Mr John Bruton TD, a member of the convention's 12-person praesidium, described the deal as a major success for the small states.
"This was an exceptionally hard-fought negotiation. At times it looked as if a majority in the praesidium would go for a system of rotation in the Commission that would not be equal as between all states."
Mr Roche predicted that the issue of how to calculate a qualified majority would be left to governments meeting in an inter-governmental conference later this year.
But the Dublin MEP, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, said governments should beware of renegotiating any deal that achieves consensus at the convention.
"I think they'll have serious political difficulties in unpicking something that achieves broad consensus," he said.
The Green Party was less enthusiastic about the proposed composition of the Commission.
Party chairman Mr John Gormley said that while yesterday's proposals "appear to preserve the idea of equality", they reduce the number of commissioners to 15 and introduce the idea of associate commissioners.
"We need to examine more closely how the rotation will work out in reality. It represents a change from Nice when we were told that the Commission wouldn't be reduced below 20 by some people on the Yes side."