Not surprisingly, current events have reminded me of the first Irish presidency of what was then the European Community, 29 years ago, writes Garret FitzGerald
The Paris summit of December 1974 had just decided to launch the European Council of Heads of Government, meeting twice or perhaps three times a year, and the first of these meetings was to be held in Dublin Castle in March 1975.
I thought it would be worthwhile to put forward some new Irish ideas on the style of the presidency, most of which had been thought up in August 1974 at a long outdoor luncheon at a restaurant in the south of France, at which I had been joined by Mary Robinson, Justin Keating and Denis Corboy, then the EU representative in Ireland, with whom, and others, Joan and I were holidaying.
One of these ideas was to hold a meeting with the entire European Commission at the start of our presidency: until then such meetings had been with the president of the Commission only.
The precedent of a presidency meeting with the whole Commission has been followed ever since, the latest such encounter having been the meeting just held at Dublin Castle.
Next, I decided that as minister I would attend and answer questions at all seven sessions of the Parliament, a task that previously had generally been delegated to a junior minister. I also made Question Time at the Parliament more informal, answering at the end all the questions together, as well as extending the scope of this session to cover foreign policy in addition to Community matters.
Another of my decisions - which the succeeding Italian presidency immediately abandoned - was to brief the media before, as well as after, council meetings. This was in an effort to counter the tendency of journalists from each country to accept too readily partisan post-council presentations by their own ministers, each seeking to put a favourable national gloss.
I also arranged for a State visit by our president, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, who addressed the four institutions in all the languages of the Community; even (after some persuasion by me on the train from Brussels to Strasbourg), speaking several paragraphs in English to the European Parliament.
Another January 1975 innovation was a move I made to give effect to the recent Paris summit resolution "to renounce the practice of making agreement on all questions conditional on the unanimous consent of all member-states", a practice that had been initiated by Gen de Gaulle in 1965 and which for the previous 10 years had abrogated the original Rome Treaty provision for taking many decisions by qualified majority.
Despite a formal objection on each occasion by the British foreign secretary, Jim Callaghan, I announced at the start of each foreign ministers' council meeting which matters on the agenda were legally open to decision by qualified majority; which of them required unanimity; and which were merely "orientations" without legal effect.
As luck would have it, no decision for which the Rome Treaty prescribed qualified majority voting actually came to be made until the very last meeting of our presidency on June 24th, when Jim Callaghan was supporting a proposal, pressed by British meat importers, that beef from Swaziland and Botswana be admitted to the Community free of levies.
The French and Germans, although agreeable to this in principle, differed on whether this should be done by refunding the levies after payment, or by remitting them altogether.
I have to say that I greatly enjoyed the discomfiture of Jim Callaghan - which was evident on his face at the far end of the table - as the trap closed on him with my announcement of a qualified majority vote to decide on a method for dropping the levy. For, despite his repeated earlier objections, he had no choice but to accept this procedure to get the proposal adopted.
My procedure for calling qualified majority votes at these council meetings was, however, abandoned by our successors in the chair and was not restored until the late 1980s, when the Luxembourg Treaty applied this process to over 300 decisions needed to give effect to the Single European market.
This scheme had been prepared by a committee of representatives of heads of government that, as president of the European Council, I had appointed in summer 1984 under the chairmanship of Prof Jim Dooge.
The first European Council meeting, held under Liam Cosgrave's presidency, took place in St Patrick's Hall in Dublin Castle in March 1975.
Although there was not a lot of substance to the long agenda for this initial meeting, it was seen as a success and was, indeed, contrasted with some subsequent meetings of that body.
The only major item was the conclusion of the rather phony "renegotiation" of British membership, a process that had been launched in somewhat aggressive terms by Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan shortly after Labour had come to power a year previously.
A happy outcome to this negotiation was clearly preordained, for it was clear that the British wanted to settle and would not need much to get them off the high horse upon which they had uncomfortably perched themselves a year earlier: some access for New Zealand butter and a "corrective measure" to reduce the British contribution to the EC budget would be sufficient.
When I pointed out to the French that an early version of a "corrective measure" proposed by the Germans and themselves literally did not add up, they explained to me that such an arithmetic error did not matter; for this was only a "flier" for the British to reject, so that when a valid solution was later offered, they could claim to have had to fight for it.
Our physical arrangements for this meeting were an outstanding success. The media, which at the recent Paris summit had been housed a long way from the meeting-place, were delighted to find themselves located directly underneath the conference hall, with direct telephone lines to the outside world.
Among the many letters of thanks we received from the media was one from Mark Arnold Foster of the Guardian saying he had never previously been asked so politely to stop smoking: "Would you be upset if I asked you would you ever mind not smoking?"