Inside politics:The primary motive behind the Government's decision to follow the British lead and opt out of EU arrangements to tackle cross-border crime was to ensure victory in next year's referendum campaign on the EU reform treaty. Fearing that a decision to opt in would be misrepresented by the No campaign, Ministers decided that the only way to take the issue off the agenda was to opt out, writes Stephen Collins.
Many supporters of the EU in the political world, and out of it, were deeply disappointed by the Government decision. A few weeks ago the Minister of State for European Affairs, Dick Roche, publicly urged his colleagues not to "slavishly follow the British" and opt out of the justice and home affairs aspects of the treaty, but ultimately they rejected his advice.
The clinching argument at Cabinet was the pragmatic one that a decision to opt in to an EU-wide system of police and judicial co-operation would be wide open to misinterpretation and exaggeration. Ministers felt that the spectre of an EU police force swooping in to drag Irish citizens away and incarcerate them for years before a trial would inevitably be conjured up during the referendum campaign.
Nobody knows better than Fianna Fáil how such fears can be whipped up. Famously during the 1982 general election, comments by Fine Gael leader, Garret FitzGerald, about the possibility of police co-operation on the island of Ireland to deal with terrorism were used by Fianna Fáil with dramatic effect. Posters with the legends "Keep the RUC out of Kerry" and "No to armed RUC patrols in Dublin" appeared in the last week of the campaign and certainly had an impact on the outcome. Charles Haughey's GUBU government seemed on the verge of a crushing defeat before the RUC scare and while it still lost the election it was not nearly as bad as expected.
It was the prospect of a similar type of strategy being adopted by the No campaigners in next year's referendum that led to the Cabinet's opt-out decision. With Ireland likely to be the only country in the EU to hold a referendum on the reform treaty, a defeat would not only cause immense difficulties for the Government but would be a huge problem for the EU as a whole.
If pragmatic electoral considerations were the key to the decision, they dovetailed with the innate conservatism of the advice emanating from the Attorney General's office and the Department of Justice. The deep attachment of the Irish legal profession to the common law system appears to lead to the worst possible construction being put on every effort to improve EU judicial and police co-operation.
During the negotiations on the same issues during the Irish presidency in 2004 some British officials were astounded, and delighted, by the arguments being made by their counterparts in Dublin. "It seems the Irish are even more fond of common law down to the last detail than the ultra-tories at home," mused one British official after talks here.
At that stage in the talks leading to the now defunct, but almost identical, European constitution, the British did not ultimately press for an opt-out and neither did we. What has changed since is a strengthening of the eurosceptic faction in the British government and increasing hysteria in the British media about the EU. That resulted in the British seeking and getting an opt-out this time around. The danger for Ireland in opting in was that as the only common law country participating, we could have been isolated when it came to future decisions on police or judicial co-operation.
The objections of the legal conservatives in the Irish system dovetailed neatly with the political imperatives of the Greens. The party has taken to Government like a duck to water and is preparing to reverse engines on its previously implacable opposition to every EU treaty. The decision to avail of the British opt-out will allow Green Ministers to tell their supporters that they have influenced the Irish position on the treaty and helped to water down its implications.
Fine Gael as the most strongly pro-EU party in the Dáil has taken a very different view and argued vehemently that Ireland should have gone with the rest of the EU, for both principled and tactical reasons. The party's spokesmen on justice in the Oireachtas, Charlie Flanagan and Senator Eugene Regan, have made the point that by tying ourselves so close to the anti-EU British we are in danger of cutting ourselves off from the European mainstream. They have also argued that improved methods of tackling serious international criminals might actually be popular with the voters.
The likelihood is that both sides are probably exaggerating the impact of the justice and home affairs aspects of the reform treaty and the opt-out may not matter all that much in the short term. However, in the longer term it may well signal a shift in Ireland's position from a country fully engaged with the development of the EU to one that is closer to the negative British attitude.
That could have an unexpected impact on domestic politics over the next couple of years. Senior people in Fianna Fáil have been speculating that the ideal way for Bertie Ahern to step down would be to become president of the European Council, a post being created under the treaty. This post, which will involve chairing meetings of EU heads of government, would suit his political skills perfectly. As the senior prime minister in the EU and the politician who negotiated the first draft of the treaty, he would appear to be the ideal candidate for the job.
However, there are serious obstacles. The first is that Fianna Fáil has always associated itself in the European Parliament with small nationalist parties rather than one of the major political groupings. By contrast Fine Gael is a member of the biggest group, the European People's Party (Christian Democrats) while the Labour Party is a member of the socialist group.
The president of the council will have to be ratified by the parliament and without a big group behind him Ahern may have trouble getting off the blocks. In Europe, as in Ireland, political parties do not hand away plum positions to outsiders, so he will have his work cut out to get the backing of one of the big groups. The decision to opt out of a key aspect of the reform treaty will hardly improve his prospects of achieving that objective so Ahern may well remain on as Taoiseach for longer than many of his colleagues think.