Because the process of creating and maintaining a genuine single market, free of any obstacles to trade, impinges on almost every aspect of government activity, all government departments are necessarily engaged in some degree in the European Union decision-making process, writes Garret FitzGerald
Understandably each department wants to pursue the particular interests for which it is responsible, and there is great resistance to any overall co-ordination of these sectoral negotiations. Yet failure to co-ordinate the approaches being adopted in different formations of the EU's Council of Ministers can have very damaging effects upon the overall national interest.
As Taoiseach, I sought to impose some order on our EU affairs by writing to ministers at the outset to emphasise the key co-ordinating role of the Department of Foreign Affairs in EU matters. In the past the insistence of the Department of Agriculture on ploughing its own furrow - to use a farming metaphor - has caused particular problems for those responsible for overall EU policy.
But more recently a new problem has arisen as the advent of EMU has increased substantially the EU role of ministers for finance, whose council meetings had previously often been somewhat perfunctory.
Since 1997 this post in our Government has been filled by an assertive Minister who appears primarily preoccupied with US investment here and is visibly unsympathetic to aspects of the EU, stances in which he has been strongly backed by the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment.
In recent times these two members of the Government have sought to assert a dangerously large and negative role in Ireland's EU policy, creating a major problem for Brian Cowen, who was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs two years ago.
I wrote here last week about the damaging impact of all this upon our Nice referendum vote, and of that event upon our relations with our EU partners, pointing out that this has also undermined the increasingly close and positive relationship that had previously been evolving with the 10 applicant countries, especially those in central and eastern Europe.
It is impossible to overestimate the extent to which during their preparations for membership these countries tended to look to Ireland for a lead.
Most of them are relatively small countries like ourselves and, as I have observed during visits to a number of them, they have seen Ireland's recent economic success within the Community as pre-eminently a model to follow.
While a number of special local factors accounted for a good deal of our growth and rise in GNP per head, nevertheless some of the key economic policy decisions that we took at various points in the past 45 years are relevant to these countries, e.g. the reorientation outwards of our economy and society in the late 1950s; the establishment of a highly-skilled Industrial Development Authority and Coras Trachtála; the methodical preparation of Irish indigenous industry for free trade in the early 1960s; and the decision in the late 1960s and afterwards to expand hugely our educational system.
Other Irish developments that have possible relevance to countries emerging from the socialist system include the tight fiscal policies of the 1981-1989 period and the social contracts of the years after 1987.
Among these key policy decisions, each taken by a particular Irish government but faithfully followed by their successors, are to be found useful precedents for central and eastern European countries, and a country like Vietnam, seeking to move from command economies to membership of the EU as democratic market economies.
All the ingredients were thus present to ensure that these new member-states would enter the EU with a disposition to work closely with us to ensure that the Union would continue to develop along lines favourable to small countries like ourselves.
With all this running in our favour, what did we do? So far as these applicant countries are concerned the Ireland to which many of them were looking as a model to follow last year threatened to block their states' entry to the Union by rejecting the treaty designed to accommodate them within a greatly enlarged Community.
The concerns of those in Ireland who voted against the Nice Treaty on this issue are totally incomprehensible to them. Are we to tell them that we are worried about losing seats in the Parliament in order to make room for them? That doesn't sound very friendly. Perhaps we are to tell them that we don't like a fractional adjustment of Council voting in favour of larger countries which, with successive enlargements, have become increasingly outnumbered within the Community by smaller ones? (When they join the small-large ratio will double from the initial three small states out of six to 19 out of 25).
As a reason for keeping them out, the small voting adjustment made by the Nice Treaty to take some account of this change doesn't make sense to these applicant countries.
No, the only conclusion these countries can reach is that we simply don't want them in: that, as they emerge from half-a-century of communist tyranny, we are not prepared to share with them what we have won for ourselves through 30 years' participation in the EU.
Perhaps, if next autumn we reverse the vote of June 2001, we may recover some of the potentially valuable ground that we have lost with these future partners. Perhaps they will forget the slap in the face that we administered to them last year. Perhaps.
It's the best we can hope for now. In fairness I should add that these reflections relate only to the current applicants. In the course of recent visits to former Yugoslav states which have a distance to go before they can hope to enter negotiations for accession, viz Croatia and Serbia (in the latter of which there is a very active Irish presence in no fewer than 10 international agencies as well as in the process of parliamentary reform), I found that our Nice referendum vote has had little impact. These states remain, for quite different reasons in the two cases, very well disposed towards Ireland.