European Diary/Denis Staunton: During the next two weeks, the Taoiseach will make the most important decision of Ireland's EU presidency by choosing whether or not to revive formal negotiations on Europe's constitutional treaty.
Most EU governments hope that Mr Ahern will conclude that agreement is possible before June and the Taoiseach himself has made clear his view that further delay can only damage the prospects for success.
The arguments in favour of an early deal are compelling, especially in view of the danger that the constitutional talks could become entangled with negotiations on the EU budget and the question of allowing Turkey to start accession talks.
A recent article by Ben Crum, a research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies, a Brussels think tank, argues however that EU leaders should use the present impasse to take a break from negotiations and engage in a debate with citizens about the draft constitutional treaty's proposals.
"The forthcoming European Parliament elections in June this year provide a further opportunity. Indeed, proceeding with the EU constitutional negotiations while completely ignoring the European Parliament elections will only reinforce the elections' image of a charade. The present Irish EU presidency has made "communicating Europe" one of its central themes. If it wants to be true to this theme, then it should propose to the spring European Council to suspend the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC), so as to allow for consultations of the national citizenry," Dr Crum writes.
Since the collapse of last December's summit in Brussels, most attention has focused on the dispute over reforming the voting system in the Council of Ministers, with Germany and France as the main advocates on one side and Poland and Spain on the other. Dr Crum believes that the voting issue is a symptom rather than the cause of the problem at the heart of the negotiations and that the difficulty in finding agreement lies at a national rather than a European level.
"For different governments the pain is in different places. For some, integration goes too fast, for others, too slow. Some have problems with the proposals on economic policy and others with those in defence or criminal law co-operation. Even if from an EU perspective these seem to be acceptable compromises, they often remain hard to defend to national constituencies, especially for those governments who expect to have a popular referendum over the Constitutional Treaty," he writes.
More than half of the EU's 25 present and future member-states are likely to put the constitutional treaty to a referendum and although he believes that EU leaders could find agreement among themselves, Dr Crum predicts trouble at the ratification stage.
"This will require the cajoling we already witnessed following the Danish rejection of the Maastricht Treaty and the Irish 'No' to the Treaty of Nice: some concessions will be made (preferably symbolic ones) and then, with a major public relations effort, the citizens will be given a second chance. All this is bound only to reinforce the downward trend of popular appreciation of the EU."
Dr Crum proposes that EU leaders should agree this month to take a break from negotiations but should agree a timetable for their resumption and pledge to complete work on the constitutional treaty. He acknowledges the danger that, as the treaty is subjected to public debate and governments change in some member-states, agreements already reached could begin to unravel.
This anxiety is one that figures strongly in the Taoiseach's calculations as he makes his decision, along with the fear that some countries could use a pause in negotiations to back away from the treaty altogether. Mr Ahern is surely right to seek agreement as early as possible but Dr Crum has identified an important deficiency in the negotiations so far - their failure to engage the popular imagination.
Despite the diversity of its composition, the Convention on the Future of Europe left most citizens cold, partly because it had to spend so much time on arcane details but also because so much of the action took place in the secrecy of the Praesidium rather than in plenary sessions.
If the Irish presidency succeeds in finding agreement among EU leaders by June, it will have triumphed over early expectations but, as Mr Ahern knows from bitter experience, it is afterwards that the most difficult task will begin - that of winning the support of Europe's citizens.