EU leaders yesterday agreed to call a special summit in the Austrian town of Innsbruck in October to launch an initiative to bring the European Union back to its citizens.
The meeting is a response to widely-expressed concerns by leaders that the EU's citizens do not understand the institutions and believe they overreach their democratic legitimacy, and it is expected to put flesh on the concept of subsidiarity, the idea that decisions should be taken as close to the citizens as possible, and which is incorporated in a protocol to the Amsterdam Treaty.
Proposals from the President of the European Commission, Mr Jacques Santer, to reform the workings of the Council of Ministers also got widespread support from the heads of government.
Mr Santer has argued that the General Affairs Council, now run by foreign ministers and dominated by foreign policy issues, should be split into two councils, one dealing with the latter, the other an important co-ordinating council for internal policies under senior ministers, possibly deputy prime ministers.
The idea is that the legitimacy of the EU suffers from too many decisions necessarily being taken by secret meetings of ambassadors, known as Coreper, and that bringing high-level political input to bear on internal issues will reassure the public and make the decision-making process more effective.
The effect would also be to shift power over EU affairs in national governments from foreign ministers towards prime ministers.
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, welcomed the initiative. He said "the General Affairs Council was now so totally subsumed in foreign affairs matters that clearly there should be some way of separating the workload . . . It's not taking up the co-ordinating issues."
The Innsbruck meeting is expected to discuss the proposal and also to agree the broad outlines of an approach to subsidiarity which will then be worked on by a group of representatives of the prime ministers ahead of decisions at the Vienna summit in December.
That approach is likely to entail new procedures for involving national governments and parliaments more closely in decisions and a clearly public declaration of dos and don'ts for the commission.
Mr Ahern stressed that it would not involve treaty changes and that the leaders had agreed to put back any discussion of perceived failings of the Amsterdam Treaty until after it had been fully ratified, that is, well into next year.
Irish sources make it clear that the prospect of another referendum on Amsterdam II does not appeal.
The discussion was started by an impassioned speech from Germany's Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, who took up themes he had broached in the joint letter he sent to the summit with President Jacques Chirac of France. The desire to reinforce subsidiarity, he insisted, was not an attack on the idea of Europe but the means of reinforcing it in its essential functions.
Meanwhile, the President of the European Parliament has come under pressure from at least seven of the heads of government in Cardiff to deal with widely-perceived abuse by MEPs of expenses.
The President, Mr Jose Maria Gil-Robles, in his traditional pre-summit address, promised that the parliament would press ahead with reform of the system. He told journalists he hoped to have agreement by the end of the year on a "common statute" for MEPs, instead of the current system under which all are paid according to national rules.
MEPs should be able to put to their electorates next June a broad outline of reforms of the European institutions, he said.