The Cabinet has agreed on an approach to the wording of the second referendum on the Nice Treaty following a meeting this morning. The final wording of the referendum is to be released on Thursday.
There was speculation last night that the favoured option would allow the referendum wording to refer to the declarations on neutrality published at the EU summit in Seville at the weekend.
Yesterday Mr Cowen appeared to rule out putting the "triple lock" on Irish military involvement overseas into the Constitution. The Government says this "triple lock" requires that any Irish military involvement in international missions overseas requires a UN mandate and the approval of the Government and the Oireachtas.
Mr Cowen said this was covered by existing legislation and he did not anticipate its being put into the Constitution.
Former taoiseach and current Fine Gael TD, Mr John Bruton said that putting neutrality into the Constitution would not work.
Speaking on RTÉ’s News At One, Mr Bruton said: "The problem would be that you are trying to put in a few phrases a definition of what constitutes our defence policy.
"Now that would mean that, as we saw with the pro-life issue, that you would put a few words in the Constitution only to discover long after that these words meant something very different in the view of judges when they came to interpret them," he said.
Mr Bruton said that he did not believe that the Government should not put any uncertainty into their ability to defend the State.
"We don't want to find ourselves in a situation that we, because of some security crisis at some time in the next 20 years, that it is in our interest to enter some agreement with other countries to defend ourselves against some threat and we find that we can't do that because of some wording that was put into the Constitution in entirely different circumstances," he said.
If the Referendum Bill is published before the Dáil goes into its summer recess at the end of the week this will allow for a poll to take place in mid or late October.
