Ireland's EU presidency will today seek to advance negotiations on the constitutional treaty with a new draft text to be discussed by senior officials from all member-states meeting in Croke Park. Denis Staunton, European Correspondent, reports.
The new draft incorporates changes agreed informally before last December's EU summit collapsed. It also introduces a number of new elements, including a reference to the equality of member-states and a suggestion that the EU could initiate action against smoking and alcohol abuse.
An Irish presidency spokesman said yesterday that the draft was aimed at narrowing down the areas of disagreement before the formal resumption of talks among foreign ministers in a fortnight.
"This is to deal with the lower level issues and to identify the political issues the ministers will look at," he said.
The draft contains no new proposals on the most contentious issues of all - the size and composition of the Commission and the definition and scope of qualified majority voting. These issues will be the focus of bilateral talks between the Taoiseach and each of the 24 other EU leaders during the next month.
The draft retains an article allowing EU ministers to agree unanimously to abolish the national veto on measures to combat tax fraud and tax evasion but says that such measures should "not affect the fiscal regimes of the member-states". The Government would prefer to remove any reference to taxation but officials said yesterday the new wording was a welcome step towards protecting national tax systems from EU influence.
In a note accompanying the draft, the Irish presidency stressed that it was a working document to facilitate consensus rather than a formal presidency proposal. The Taoiseach suggested at the weekend that the constitution was unlikely to include an explicit reference to God, but officials said yesterday the wording of the preamble was likely to be amended to include a stronger reference to religious values. The current text refers to "the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe" but some religious and political leaders have pressed for a distinct reference to Christianity.
The new draft proposes that the EU could enact laws to combat "major cross-border health scourges, as well as measures which have as their direct objective the protection of public health regarding tobacco and the abuse of alcohol". The draft would also allow the EU to introduce measures to combat serious threats to health "when they affect more than one member-state".
More than 30 issues remain unresolved and the Irish presidency hopes to find consensus on most of them before the end of this month. The intensification of the negotiations coincides with the start of the race to succeed Mr Romano Prodi as Commission president.