The European Union plans to send its foreign policy chief Javier Solana to Syria for talks on Lebanon and Middle East peace, Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern said today.
The visit would end an EU freeze on high-level contacts with Damascus.
"The intention is that Javier Solana will go to Damascus and I very much welcome that," Mr Ahern said after EU foreign ministers discussed Lebanon and the Middle East on the margins of a summit.
French President Jacques Chirac has been blocking EU contacts with Syria over its alleged role in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.
Asked whether the 27-nation bloc had given Solana a mandate, Mr Ahern said: "It's on the cards... it is recognised that we have to speak with one voice."
Mr Solana himself told reporters at an EU summit he would visit Saudi Arabia and Lebanon next week but did not mention Syria.
"I will be going to the Middle East on Monday, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, to continue following the situation in all the theatres that are important," he said.
EU diplomats said his Middle East trip was intended to boost Saudi-brokered efforts both to form a Palestinian national unity government and to reconcile Lebanon's pro- and anti-Syrian factions, locked in a potentially explosive standoff.
European countries provided the bulk of an augmented UN peacekeeping force deployed in southern Lebanon last year after fighting between Israel and Lebanese Hizbullah guerrillas in which more than 1,000 people died.
Ireland has sent some 160 troops.
But diplomats say efforts to convert a tense ceasefire into a more stable peace have been stymied by Western efforts to isolate Syria and Iran, Hizbullah's main backers.