Mr Romano Prodi elaborated an eloquent defence of the Nice Treaty in Cork yesterday, describing its essential purpose as preparing the EU for enlargement. After all the sacrifices the candidate countries had made to join the EU, he said, how could the 15 member-states deny entry to newcomers because of formalistic, legal details?
"So let there be no doubt whatever that the Nice Treaty is a political condition for enlargement," he declared.
Meanwhile in Brussels, the Commission President's staff sought to play down the impact of his earlier statement that, legally, enlargement could proceed without Nice.
"At the worst, there may be a technical let-out that may make it possible for enlargement to take place," a spokesman said, adding hastily that such an outcome would not be satisfactory.
Commission officials were satisfied last night that Mr Prodi was back "on message" and that his visit to Ireland would serve its intended purpose - to reassure the Irish people that Brussels was listening to their concerns and to strengthen the Government's hand before a second poll.
No number of bear-hugs with the Taoiseach, however, can obscure the damage Mr Prodi's earlier statement has caused. And no number of clarifications can put back into its bottle the political genie he has released.
When a reporter asked Mr Prodi's spokesman in Brussels yesterday whether the Commission President was speaking in a personal capacity or for the Commission in his Irish Times interview, the spokesman gave the only answer he could give.
"The Commission President is the Commission President and when he gives an interview, he speaks as the Commission President," he said.
It follows that anything Mr Prodi says in public is interpreted as a political statement. And therein lies the problem that this week's intervention has created in European capitals.
At Gothenburg the EU leaders agreed a strategy in response to Ireland's No vote. They promised to press ahead with negotiations with candidate countries while the other 14 member-states ratified the Nice Treaty in their parliaments.
They wanted to reassure the applicants, many of which are experiencing a growing popular opposition to joining the EU, that the referendum result would not delay enlargement. They hoped that if all other EU states ratified Nice, a second poll in Ireland would stand a better chance of success.
Mr Prodi's public statement that enlargement was technically possible without Nice has upset the balance between these two aspirations. And the member-states are angry that the Commission President, who did not have a vote at Nice, appears to be questioning the importance of the treaty.
Their suspicions are fuelled by the knowledge that some senior Commission officials reacted with pleasure to the Irish result, seeing it as an opportunity to abandon Nice and start negotiating a new treaty that would avoid what they saw as the inadequacies of Nice.
Even if such suspicions are unfounded, Mr Prodi's gaffe raises questions about his judgment. The comments of many Commission officials on the statement are unprintable. Some observers in Brussels believe it could start a bandwagon to unseat Mr Prodi before his term ends in 2005.
In May last year, Mr Prodi created a stir when he told The Spectator that joining the euro was not necessarily irrevocable. His statement came three months before Denmark held a referendum on joining the single currency. Then Mr Prodi could argue that because the interview was conducted by an MEP, he did not realise his comments were on the record. This time, he has no such excuse.
His answer was in response to a simple question: how can enlargement proceed without the Nice Treaty? And his officials agree that he was quoted accurately. Germany's Frankfurter Rund schau suggested yesterday that Mr Prodi was unaware of the political import of what he was saying.
"But that is exactly his problem. The academic devil comes over him and he starts theorising about things that nobody wants politically. Prodi, the intellectual who went into politics, has still not settled properly into his position as Commission President," the paper says.
As Mr Prodi approaches the halfway stage of his term in office, the question many of his colleagues are asking is: how long must they wait?