With the framework of an EU Agenda 2000 farm deal agreed (although not its financing), the attention of EU Ministers last week turned to the other great component of EU spending, structural and cohesion funding.
While the Common Agricultural Policy this year will eat up some £32 billion, structural funding represents another £26 billion. The problems faced here are every bit as difficult. Indeed the gulf between rich and poor, contributors and recipients, may be even harder to bridge in the lead-up to the Berlin summit that is supposed to settle everything.
For those states partly in transition from one status to another, like the Republic and Portugal, the problems are particularly acute, as the German Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, acknowledged last week. Irish negotiators feared losing over 50 per cent even before the Germans started their Thatcherlike demands for their money back.
Now the EU leaders must find the means to pay for enlargement, to give the Germans some of their money back, to fund some of the £5 billion farm overrun, to continue funding to the poorest regions at the same level as under the last programme, and, very much lastly, to ensure that those in transition do not take too hard a hammering.
All this must be done within the current budgetary ceiling of 1.27 per cent of EU GDP. And the problem is compounded by a determination of some of the contributing states to further "stabilise" the structural funds budget, in effect to cut it by as much as a third in real terms.
Currently the budget gap between the Commission's proposals in Agenda 2000, broadly seen by Ireland as its bottom line, and the plans of the more ferocious axe-wielders like the Germans and the French is of the order of a colossal £16 billion.
Yet the Commission had already gone a long way down the road of fiscal rectitude. While the EU draft budget for 1999 proposes to spend £30.8 billion on structural and Cohesion Funds, Agenda 2000 had cut that to £25 billion for the 15 by 2006 (in 1999 prices). The latest "stabilisation" proposals bring it down to £20.3 billion - a real cut of 34 per cent.
Ireland will have received between 19941999 (at 1999 prices) some £5.4 billion of total EU structural spending of £135 billion. That was an annual average of £0.9-bn for Ireland with an additional £200 million coming from the Cohesion Fund each year, an average throughout the period of roughly £1,800 per head of population.
The period coincides with the dramatic, and in EU terms unique, surge in Irish growth,, giving rise to a misleading impression among many of our partners that structural funding paid for the boom.
Ireland's GNP rose in the 1990s some 18 percentage points to 87 per cent of the EU average. GDP grew even faster. By some way the best other EU performer was Denmark, which rose 11 percentage points in the same period.
But economic studies of the components of Irish growth put the direct contribution of structural funds at only some half a per cent a year, while, among other causes, foreign direct investment represents close on four times that.
Yet that is not to say that the Irish economy can easily do without such EU spending. If we want to continue improving our infrastructure and training our young people the money to do so will have to be found internally.
Much of the spending on both in the last decade was co-financed by the EU. And the EU operational programmes for urban and rural development and the Leader programmes have channelled huge sums into disadvantaged areas.
The public capital programme is particularly vulnerable.
The Commission has acknowledged some of the problem in its proposals. It is determined to target the reduced funds at its disposal in a more concentrated way to three instead of seven "Objectives".
It wants to do so both by reducing the areas eligible for aid significantly in the course of the seven-year budget period and by rigidly enforcing eligibility ceilings, notably the 75 per cent of EU GDP average per capita ceiling on Objective One.
Objective One, targeted at the poorest regions, will still receive the bulk of funding, but with coverage reduced from 51 per cent to 35-40 per cent of the Union's population - 11 regions drop out, including the east and south of Ireland, Northern Ireland, the Lisbon region, Berlin, the Scottish Highlands, Valencia and Corsica.
These regions are supposed to receive a new status of "Objective One in transition", with funding for the first two years on a par with the full Objective One areas, but then tapering down over the subsequent four years.
At that stage some of them will become eligible for different forms of aid, but the Commission had hoped to establish a one-year firebreak between the end of the tapering and the beginning of the next budget.
The idea is to prevent current full Objective One areas which will then be above the 75 per cent ceiling from claiming an automatic right to transitional status next time round.
Anxious to save yet more money, the German presidency has proposed that the transitional period be cut from six to four years and has suggested cutbacks in the rate of aid from year one. It is also seeking substantial cuts in Cohesion Fund eligibility.
The Commission puts the total cost of the maintenance of average structural funds aid levels at 1999 prices to those still in full Objective One at £100 billion over the full seven-year period.
If Ireland's proposed 1-million strong western/Border/midlands region receives aid at the average rate - certainly the best it could expect - it could count on up to £1.2 billion over the full period.
BUT estimating the upper level of aid to the rest of the country is virtually impossible, officials say. There is still all to play for in the difficult negotiations - member-states still disagree about whether there should be a separate fund for regions in transition from various Objectives, how big it should be, or what factors should be taken into account in assessing aid per capita.
The Commission has suggested optimistically an allocation of a total of £12.4 billion for regions in transition, now being whittled away by the Germans, and yet if Irish negotiators secure £1.5 billion of that for the east and south of the State they would be doing well.
That makes a very tentative overall take of well under £3 billion, significantly less than half of what was achieved in 1993 - and that based on the more benign scenarios on offer. Not surprisingly the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, protested in Bonn two weeks ago to fellow leaders that the options being put forward by some of our partners would reduce Irish structural fund per capita receipts significantly below those of states far richer than us.
There are hints, however, that the severity of that potential cut in our structural funding is beginning to register with our partners, notably in Mr Fischer's singling out of Ireland and Portugal last week as "special problems".
But the suggestion by the Italian foreign minister, Mr Lamberto Dini, that a consensus was emerging around the idea that no member-state should lose more than 30 per cent of its historic funding is being regarded, unfortunately, as a misunderstanding on his part. Such a result would be remarkable.
There is no doubt that the decision to seek to regionalise in Ireland will raise overall potential receipts somewhat, but not a great deal unless the worst case scenario for transitional regions materialises.
Indeed IBEC and others are convinced that the best case for splitting the country is related instead to the higher level of national industrial capital grants payable in Objective One regions.
And the story does not end there. German concerns at the unjust level of their £8.5 billion net contributions have also put the contributions system on the agenda for the Berlin talks. An agreement on a new GNP-based system of member-state payments to the budget is likely to replace in 2002 the current system based on both VAT receipts and a GNP ingredient.
(The change is seriously opposed only by Italy because its contributions have been kept down by underpayment of VAT because of the huge black economy). But an added refinement which would put a ceiling on member-states' net contributions, a generalised version of the British rebate, would be painful to those like Ireland who have yet to become net contributors.
And you thought the farm talks were complicated?