Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a contribution to the debate on the EU reform treaty. I also was grateful to receive a good briefing from the officials of the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

The reform treaty is an important statement of policies and principles for the future of the European Union and for the operation of its institutions. The treaty, if ratified, will be the seventh major treaty negotiated between member states since the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The vision of Monnet and Schuman to mould a peaceful and prosperous Europe through pooling sovereignty while retaining national identity has created one of the great projects of our time. The eagerness with which ten new countries joined the Union in 2004, and two more in 2007, demonstrates the project retains its momentum 50 years on. The fact that a host of other countries are anxious to join or are externally associated with the project demonstrates its obvious success and attraction to non-member states in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

A group of 27 countries in 2007 cannot operate in the same way as a group of six countries could in 1957. The core values remain the same but administrative, institutional and policy-making structures must be adapted and streamlined. The Treaty of the Single European Act 1986, the Treaty on the European Union 1992, the Maastricht treaty 1995, the Amsterdam treaty 1997, and the Nice treaty 2002 all dealt with the issues of the day facing an expanding Union in terms of member states and their functions.

The reform treaty seeks to consolidate achievements of the past by, for example, giving legal status to the Charter of Fundamental Rights. It seeks to overhaul the Union's institutions so as to provide effective operating mechanisms for the recent expansion by an additional 12 member states from 15 to 27. It also seeks to enhance the Union's capacity to counter cross-border crime, especially in the areas of drugs, money laundering, trafficking in people and terrorism. It further seeks to strengthen the Union's capacity to promote employment, innovation and social cohesion and it looks specifically to future challenges and opportunities.

The treaty establishes ambitious global objectives. It provides for joint policies to seek to end global warming and tackle climate change. I understand this was a specific initiative from Ireland, which is most welcome. The treaty establishes broadly based policies to end global poverty and it seeks to strengthen the Union's contribution to international peace, stability and crisis management.

At the same time the reform treaty restates the core values and objectives of the European Union, including the commitment to peace and universal human rights, to the Charter of the United Nations, to full employment, to a social market economy and to public services. The role of national parliaments in the application of subsidiarity is specifically reinforced and a new citizen's initiative on participation is proposed to enhance transparency and citizen participation.

For a people to truly claim to own a developing institutional political process, they must first understand it. The popular failure to grasp the European architecture is not due to any intellectual deficiency on the part of the people of Europe, nor is it simply due to lack of interest; the fact is, the process has to date been managed by a political class concerned only to ensure that its members understand each other, rather than that their message reaches European citizens as a whole.

Why should any citizen be expected to offer his or her adherence and loyalty to a set of normative rules, institutions and values that are not clearly and legibly set out, and that are incapable of being tracked except by professional experts? That is why one of the most important treaty-making tasks, one that should have been considered at Nice but was yet again postponed to a future intergovernmental conference, was the most basic but least exciting aspect, the drawing up of a genuinely readable version of the constitution of Europe.

That was the task that was most recently abandoned by the German Presidency. Instead of a constitutional treaty, we now have a reform treaty, drafted so as to make the whole series of treaties even more unintelligible than they were before. Instead of constituting a coherent document, the text consists of a series of references, amendments, insertions, protocols, declarations and opt-outs. The document is totally incoherent and inaccessible to all but bureaucrats, draftsmen and lawyers. It makes a mockery of the treaty's commitment to openness, transparency and the new citizens' initiative when the very document which asserts these commitments is opaque and the antithesis of what it asserts.

When this happens it is difficult to be persuaded that the winds of change are blowing through the corridors of the Berlaymont. The treaty to establish a constitution for Europe, which was the forerunner of the reform treaty text, was a coherent document. Incidentally, that was the only one of the treaties which was compiled by a convention. The Convention on the Future of Europe consisted of 105 members and represented the national parliaments of the member states, the European Parliament, the member states' Governments, the Committee of the Regions, the social partners, NGOs and the European Ombudsman. All other treaties, including the present reform treaty, were compiled and drafted by Government representatives through the standard bureaucratic mechanism of intergovernmental conferences. Clearly the convention method is the way forward for the future. The Irish people and citizens of Europe are crying out for intelligible and transparent documents, especially treaties.

The Government has compounded the bureaucratic approach I have outlined by proceeding to sign off on the reform treaty at the European Council of Heads of State on 18 to 19 October in Lisbon without the slightest prior consultation with the Irish people or their representatives. As the Government has failed to re-establish the Joint Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs more than five months after the election there is no parliamentary mechanism to scrutinise the proposals and question the Minister for Foreign Affairs or the Minister of State with responsibility for European Affairs.

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