Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The negotiations will go ahead without our participation and, ultimately, an instrument would be adopted by the member states. We might be allowed some tangential engagement even when we have not opted in but, effectively, we would not be officially negotiating the instrument. If we did not like it, nobody would care greatly. When it came out in final form, we could decide to opt in but we would have had minimal influence on how it was finally framed.