Ireland is willing to consider backing the significant extension of majority voting in the EU and other institutional changes likely to be proposed at the treaty-changing Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) once it has received a guarantee that it will keep its commissioner, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Brian Cowen, said yesterday.
Mr Cowen, who was attending his first meeting of EU foreign ministers, also announced the appointment of the retired, veteran diplomat, Mr Noel Dorr, as his personal representative in the IGC which opened formally yesterday. It is due to conclude in Nice in December.
Mr Dorr, a former secretary general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, successfully steered the last IGC through the Irish presidency in 1996 as the representative of the minister of the day, Mr Dick Spring. He won considerable praise for a draft treaty produced for the Dublin summit that was in large measure to be reproduced in the final treaty. Mr Cowen said that the retention of a commissioner was "a fundamental objective" during the IGC negotiations, a position which reflects that held by the State during the Amsterdam Treaty negotiations.
The current round is supposed to concentrate on the so-called "leftovers" of Amsterdam which failed to agree on the reduction in the number of commissioners and reweighting of voting in the Council of Ministers to redress a perceived imbalance against the larger states. The reduction in veto voting is also to be addressed, and the Commission is also keen to put on the agenda the simplification of the treaty's "flexibility" provisions.
Although Mr Cowen's view on one-commissioner-per-country does not break new ground, his apparent willingness to consider more majority voting once the first issue is dealt with suggests a more flexible posture by the Government than had been seen up to now. Critically, the Government has been determined not to force a referendum by only accepting changes which would not impinge on the Irish Constitution. Mr Cowen yesterday suggested that if the agenda could be confined to the leftovers then a referendum would not necessarily be required. Mr Dorr, who was born in Limerick, was educated at NUI Galway and then Georgetown University, Washington DC. He joined the public service in 1957 and the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1960.
He became political director in 1974 and was appointed permanent representative to the United Nations in 1980, serving for two years on the Security Council. Following his retirement in 1995 he was appointed to a special high-level committee on world governance at the request of the UN Secretary-General.
