The Cabinet has approved a draft of the Referendum Bill setting out the broad terms of the constitutional amendment on the Lisbon Treaty which will be put to the electorate in late May or early June.
The Bill was presented yesterday by the Minister of State for European Affairs, Dick Roche. Discussions will now take place between the Minister and the pro-treaty Opposition parties, Fine Gael and Labour, in order to get agreement on the final wording of the Bill in the next two weeks.
A Government spokesman said the objective was to get the final draft of the Bill approved by the Cabinet in two weeks' time and it would be debated by the Dáil as soon as possible after that. The referendum would then be held on a Thursday or a Friday in the last week in May or the first week in June.
Minister for Finance Brian Cowen, who was in Brussels for a meeting of EU finance ministers yesterday, told journalists that it was in Ireland's future economic interest to vote Yes for the treaty.
"This treaty has one primary objective and that is to make the European Union more effective in how it will carry out its business into the future. A more efficient European Union will help to develop a stronger European and Irish economy," said Mr Cowen.
He said one of Ireland's key selling points to investors was that we are committed to the EU and firms were being attracted here as a gateway to a marketplace of 500 million people.
"When Ireland joined the European Union in 1973, the value of foreign direct investment in Ireland was worth €16 million. Last year, there were 139,000 jobs in IDA companies in Ireland and these jobs generated €3 billion in tax receipts for Irish government spending programmes," said Mr Cowen.
He asked whether opponents of the treaty could point to one economic argument as to why Irish people should vote against the EU reform treaty.
"Those who opposed previous European treaties on economic grounds were always found wanting with their arguments? There is an economic justification for Ireland to vote Yes for the EU reform treaty. Voting Yes for this treaty is a vote for jobs, growth and positive economic development," he said.
Libertas, which is campaigning for a No vote, responded by listing 10 arguments why the treaty was bad for Irish business.
It said the relegation of the commitment to "free and undistorted competition" from the preamble to a protocol in the treaty was a symbolic backward step from one of the founding principles of the EEC and signaled a general slowing-down of free market economic policies.
Libertas said the Lisbon Treaty enshrines a "one size fits all" approach by the EU to key policy areas such as environmental and energy regulations which suited bigger states and not Ireland.
It also said that proposals for a Common Consolidated Corporation Tax Base which had been shelved until after the treaty was ratified would come back on the agenda and the proposals were not dead in the water as claimed by Mr Roche.
Among the other anti-business aspects of the treaty cited by Libertas was the Charter of Fundamental Rights which it said contained a large number of articles that might affect employment law such as the provision that third-country workers were "entitled to working conditions equivalent to those of citizens of the Union."
