VB: Let's move on to the Nice Treaty. You and other people told the Irish electorate there would not be enlargement of the EU without the Nice Treaty. Romano Prodi said in Ireland last week there could be enlargement without the treaty. Why did you mislead us?

ND: I think it is a bit presumptuous to say that I told the Irish people anything. I was working under instructions, I was at official level.

VB: You wrote articles in the newspapers and you went on radio and television.

ND: Okay, I did write one article and I'll take up your question.

I think there is a very big historic project under way in Europe which is that the whole of Europe is potentially restructuring itself, voluntarily and on a democratic basis. There are two sides to that.

There are 12 countries now wanting to join the EU of 15 and there are others still waiting in the wings. Each of those countries on its side has to negotiate a treaty of accession and prepare itself to catch up and to join and accept the responsibilities of joining. On the other side, the EU has to prepare itself to receive them. It has been a theme of the European Union since before the Treaty of Amsterdam that it was necessary to prepare its structures, its decision-making and so on to accommodate the new members.

VB: Yes. But we were told that enlargement couldn't take place without the Nice Treaty and now we are being told that enlargement can take place without the Nice Treaty. Which is right?

ND: All the member-states agreed that enlargement couldn't take place and wouldn't take place without the reforms envisaged by the Nice Treaty because the strain put on the existing institutions could be so great that the Union would collapse or freeze up.

VB: That's a political judgment but we were told that enlargement was legally impossible without the Nice Treaty and now we are being told it isn't.

ND: Well, if you want to get into legalities, you have to look at the protocol on the institution that was attached to the Treaty of Amsterdam. It had two paragraphs, the first paragraph said that when the first new members are admitted, there would be one commissioner per member-state provided that by then agreement had been reached on a re-weighting of votes on the Council of Ministers to compensate the larger members-states for giving up their second commissioner. The second paragraph said that one year before the Union is due to go larger than 20, there would be a comprehensive review of the institutions, in other words at another inter-governmental conference. That's the legally adopted text of the Amsterdam protocol. Some people have said that you could admit five under the first paragraph without triggering the second paragraph; in other words, you could keep the number to 20 or below. The first question is how you would pick which five out of the 12 who are clamouring to get in. But leave that aside, the condition for the operation of the first paragraph, the reduction of the commission to one per member-state, was that prior agreement would have been reached on a reweighting of votes in the council.

VB: So what's Romano Prodi (the President of the EU Commission) talking about then?

ND: It is not for me to speak for him, but he is making some kind of distinction between what is theoretically legally possible and what is politically absolutely imperative, and it is imperative because everybody insists on it. I don't believe it is even legally possible because of the Amsterdam protocol that I have referred to, but maybe he is finding a way through that. I don't see it.

VB: One of the concerns that there is about the Nice Treaty and about successive treaties and the European project as a whole is the thing is flawed in a fundamental way: it is not democratic. Why should we the people continue to give more powers to institutions over which we have no control?

ND: Remember, the Nice Treaty was intended merely to deal with the leftovers from the Amsterdam Treaty. In other words, the three or four issues that couldn't be dealt with at Amsterdam, they had a late-night session ending at half three in the morning at Amsterdam and they put together this protocol that I have just referred to. They couldn't deal with these problems. There were three or four residual problems from Amsterdam which were called leftovers and the theory was that that was the mandate for the Nice negotiations, keep to the leftovers, deal with them, get them out of the way and then the Nice Treaty itself has attached to it a declaration which provides for a major debate on the future of the union leading up to a new treaty in 2004. So the whole concept was, Nice deals with the few leftovers from Amsterdam and once they are out of the way, you undertake the real discussion on the future of the Union which now is to take place. The framework for it was to be worked out by December 2001.

This was to deal with the division of competences between national level and union level. In other words, what is done at the level of the State and what is done at the level of the Union. That's a major German preoccupation. Also it was to make the Treaties more comprehensible. A third objective was the role of national parliaments in the whole architecture of the Union. A fourth was the future status of this political charter of rights which was adopted as a political declaration.

So the concept was that Nice deals with leftovers and then the major debate begins.

VB: How do you think the European Union should be made democratic and, particularly, how do you deal with the problem that the most powerful institution in the Union, the Council of Ministers, is accountable to nobody?

ND: It is of course the case that the Council of Ministers, as such, is not accountable to anybody, but the individual Ministers in the Council speak for their Governments who are responsible to their national parliaments and therefore responsible ultimately to the electorate. But the real need now for a number of years has been to make the Union more democratically accountable, to bring it closer to the electorate and make it understood and supported by the people.

VB: What is going to happen now that we voted against it?

ND: I have to emphasise in everything I say, I am a private citizen. I do not speak for Government in any way. My sense is that in any decision, any important decision which affects your life, if they say no to something, it seems to me reasonable enough to say to them, are you sure, do you understand the consequences and then say are you sure you want to say no?

If the Irish people say no definitively to the treaty then legally there cannot be a treaty because it only goes into force if every member-state ratifies it. If the Irish people definitively refuse to ratify it then there is no treaty. That is quite clear. On the other hand, what would happen then politically its unknowable at the moment but I could well imagine that the 14 member-states might look for some other way forward with the result perhaps that Ireland would be edged out, or gradually drop off.

VB: They couldn't find another way forward without our agreement.

ND: True, under the present structures and institutions and legally, you're perfectly right. There cannot be a Treaty of Nice unless all member-states ratify it. But I am saying that they might look for some other way forward. It is open to 14 countries to try and find some other way forward under the structures that we're are all party to. You are right that the treaty would have failed.

VB: Why can't the treaty be amended now to deal with the concerns that the Irish people have about the treaty?

ND: The other member-states are not willing to reopen the thing. I would make this point that in other treaties, such as the Maastricht Treaty for example, which had provisions on economic and monetary union and Denmark didn't wish to participate and neither did the UK or Sweden, but it was possible there to negotiate a protocol or opt-out or whatever. This treaty is somewhat different. It is not just a matter of opting out. This treaty is about the decision-making system and the structure of the Commission and the weighting of votes in the Council and it is the result of a compromise, a very hard-fought compromise which, incidentally, outside Ireland was seen as more of a victory for the small member-states and something of a defeat for the larger member-states. It is a restructuring of the system, and therefore you cannot easily, it seems to me, and this is a private opinion, it is not going to be easy to have an opt-out for Ireland from something that relates to how the whole system works.