TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen has committed himself to holding another referendum on the Lisbon Treaty by next October, following a positive response to Irish concerns at the EU summit which ended yesterday in Brussels.
The summit agreed to Mr Cowen's proposal that all EU member states should retain a commissioner and that legally binding guarantees to protect the Irish position on neutrality, tax and abortion would be drafted in the coming months.
The wording of an Irish proposal to strengthen workers' rights prompted opposition from British prime minister Gordon Brown, who met the Taoiseach and French president Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday to clarify the issue.
Mr Cowen said he was very pleased at the outcome. "The change in the commission arrangements so that Ireland keeps its commissioner is hugely significant," he said.
Undertakings given by Ireland's EU partners to address the concerns of the Irish people meant they were well on the way to a new package.
"On the basis of the agreement today, and on condition of our being able to satisfactorily put guarantees in place, I have said I would be prepared to return to the public to put a new package and to seek their approval of it."
Mr Cowen stressed there was a lot of detailed work to be carried out in the preparation of the legal guarantees on neutrality, tax, family and ethical issues.
On the workers' rights issue, EU sources said there were concerns legally binding guarantees offered to Ireland on social rights could have caused political problems in Britain.
British foreign secretary David Miliband said that giving workplace rights concessions to the Irish could have led to demands from the House of Commons to re-open debate on the Lisbon Treaty.
Mr Cowen insisted the EU was prepared to confirm the high importance it attached to workers' rights. "That is of considerable significance in the context of the Charter which will provide explicit legal protection for workers' rights if the treaty is ratified."
However, Siptu general president Jack O'Connor said the union would "have to assess the substance of what is being proposed". In a statement, he said: "Workers voted overwhelmingly against the original proposition and are unlikely to be attracted by an alternative unless issues relating to people's rights at work are addressed in a tangible and meaningful way. There are issues which need to be dealt with at EU level but a great deal can be done by the Irish Government at an exclusively domestic level."
President Sarkozy said after the summit that everybody accepted that legal guarantees on neutrality, taxation and family were "important issues for our Irish friends". He said the Irish legal guarantees would be included in the accession treaty for Croatia which was expected to join the EU in two or three years.
Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said there was a clear message from the summit to the Irish people. "If they vote Yes to the Lisbon Treaty, they can keep their commissioner. If they vote No, they can't," he said.
Speaking in San Francisco on the second day of a week-long visit to the United States, President Mary McAleese said Ireland's position at the heart of the EU was a powerful advantage in meeting new challenges. "It's absolutely crucial to us, the alchemy for us of being members of the European Union. I don't know how many steps up we took as a country when we joined the European Union; some day the historians will tell us that. But certainly from the Ireland of the 1970s to the Ireland that we have lived through, we have seen the most remarkable and formidable change both in our quality of life in Ireland and in our contribution to the global family right around the world," she said.