Ireland's euro-headaches

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- The Irish are the wondrous infants of Europe, the small but fast-growing and creative nation that European Union bureaucrats display as the perfect example of the magical effect of EU membership. After the comic opera of the last six months, when Italy's flamboyant premier Silvio Berlusconi held the EU's rotating presidency, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief that the EU affairs now pass into Irish hands on New Year's Day.

The Irish are friends with everybody, even with their old colonial masters the Brits. They embody all the benefits of EU membership, having used their 30 years of membership to soar from one of Europe's poorer nations to being one of its richest, with a GDP per head that is 125 percent of the EU average. The fact that Ireland astutely used EU funds -- and the farmer-friendly Common Agricultural Policy -- to boost its annual GDP by an average three percent a year certainly helped.

And now with ten new member states about to join the EU, at a splendid party to be hosted on oceans of Guinness in Dublin in May 1, Ireland is the EU's equivalent of teacher's pet, the example to which all new members should aspire. It has invested wisely in education, infrastructure and high-tech. It has wooed foreign investors while retaining the traditional rustic charm (now incorporating some of the world's finest golf courses) so attractive to American tourists.

Ireland has played the Brussels game with silky skill. It cozies up to the French on farm policies, supports the Brits on the need for low taxes, agrees with the Germans on devoted support for the United Nations, and is almost always to be found on the side of the majority.

And Ireland has always been supportive of the Commission as the EU's key institution, as the custodian not only of the EU treaties and the spirit of the European community, but also the upholder of the rights of the small nations. The Irish have been equally supportive of the European parliament -- which is why Parliament's current president, a silver-tongued ex-TV journalist named Pat Cox, is also an Irishman.

The Irish embody the spirit of communality and compromise, and have turned a pretty penny in the process. The land of bards and poets has not just transformed its economy into the Celtic Tiger; they have become the most adroit of Euro-diplomats.

But now comes the hard part. The Irish face two big headaches after Jan. 1. The most obvious is the crisis over the EU's proposed constitution, which collapsed the Brussels summit earlier this month. The immediate issue is the German insistence on getting more of a say in the EU Council, the decision-making body where the national governments meet, while the Spaniards and Poles refuse, maintaining that the original deal struck at the Nice summit three years ago should prevail.

Under the Nice agreement, the big countries like Germany (population 81 million), France, Britain and Italy (each with 60 million) were to get 29 votes in the Council, while Poland and Spain (with populations below 40 million) each got 27 votes. The Germans with some justice say this is not fair. The Poles and Spaniards say with equal justice that a deal is a deal -- and the Poles add that their citizens just voted in a referendum to join the EU on the old terms, and it would be unjust to change them now.

Being a small nation with a population of four million, Ireland might claim to be neutral in this fight. Not so. While the tussle between the big nations and the less big was the issue on which the new constitution foundered, underlying it was a broad resentment shared by most of the smaller member states against the big boys. The current bogey-word in Brussels is 'Directorate' which refers to the fear of the smaller nations that the Big Three of Germany, France and Britain are increasingly running the EU show.

Ireland's prime minister, Bertie Ahern, will spend the next two months flying around the EU capitals in his government's new jet with his foreign minister Brian Cowen, and Dick Roche, minister for Europe. They will try, probably in vain, to re-start talks on the constitution in March, before the big May Day when the new members all join the EU.

"I have no doubt that there will be an agreement. The main question is when," Cowen observed this week.

Most observers reckon that the 'when' will be a long time coming, in part because prime minister Ahern wants no new German-Polish rows to upset his May Day celebration. Ahern himself has sounded skeptical in interviews he gave this week.

"If colleagues want to move forward, the Irish presidency is willing to put in whatever effort and energy is necessary to do so," he told a group of visiting EU journalists. And if not, he added, "then the Irish presidency will not be able to move them on."

Part of the trouble is that Ireland is no longer seen as entirely disinterested in these matters. Dublin has broken with the discreet habits of a lifetime to declare that it opposes the Franco-German proposal for a "two-speed Europe" in which big states such as France and Germany could forge on to ever-closer unity in what French President Jacques Chirac calls a "pioneer group."

Ireland's second problem is that its presidency is supposed to produce an EU defense agreement, while Ireland insists on sticking to its traditional neutrality -- a neutrality it maintained even during World War II against Hitler and during the Cold War against the Soviet Union, while benefiting from the quiet protection of British and American forces. Under this less than proud tradition, Ireland simply refuses any EU pact that calls on all members to come to the aid of other members if they are attacked, an issue of very powerful and immediate interest to the Baltic states who have just emerged from 50 years under Soviet rule.

As a result, Ireland's chosen slogan for its six months at the EU helm, "Europeans working together," rings rather hollow for some of those new members from Eastern Europe. But if any European country can charm its way through these two minefields, it will be Ireland.