The Government has nominated Mr Ray MacSharry to the Convention on the Future of Europe and a decision is awaited on the identity of the two members of the Oireachtas to complete Ireland's delegation.
This convention has an ambitious mandate to examine how best the European Union should be organised politically as it enlarges. It will meet for 15 months from March 1st. It is vital that Ireland should participate actively in its deliberations, since they will frame the subsequent negotiations between the member states on a new EU treaty in 2003-4.
This will be a much more important and broad-ranging agreement than the Nice Treaty defeated in last June's referendum. For the first time, it gives the European public and parliaments the opportunity to have clear views on issues before they are negotiated. The convention's scope is well flagged in the comprehensive report prepared by Mr John Bruton TD for the Oireachtas Joint Committee on European Affairs. It deals with the challenges facing the EU and the expectations of its citizens for a more democratic, transparent and efficient union.
Mr Bruton has dramatised these issues by calling for the direct election of the Commission president. This would, he says, ensure that every four or five years, there would be a simultaneous discussion in a cafe in Palermo and a pub in Bangor Erris and over the rest of Europe, which would help create a "European public area, a single European society" and a new political identity alongside the national ones.
His report deals imaginatively with other questions about how to make the EU more subject to democratic legitimacy. These include more involvement by national parliamentarians in EU affairs to match the importance of its legislation. Most of that can best be done at national level, he suggests, by dramatically improving the quality of Oireachtas scrutiny.
Mr Bruton warns that Ireland faces "huge economic and political difficulties" if the Nice Treaty is rejected a second time. Unfortunately, his party is not participating in the National Forum on Europe to drive that case home. The forum is becoming a more effective platform for political debate on Ireland's role in Europe following its countrywide tour.