Ireland

Irish Parliament in Dublin (Photo: Irish Government)

Ireland has a population of 4.21 million and an area of 70,000 km2. It joined the EU in 1973 together with the UK and Denmark.

At present, it has 7 out of 345 votes in the Council and 13 out of 785 seats in the EU Parliament. The Lisbon Treaty will halve the Irish influence in the Council from 2 to 0,85 % when the EU will decide according to size of the population. Ireland will also lose one seat in the European Parliament and go down to 12.

12 June 2008 Ireland voted "Nil" - No - to the Lisbon Treaty. The turnout was 53 % and there was 53,4 % No and 46,6 % Yes votes. France and Germany established a joint declaration where they asked the remaining Member States to ratify the Treaty. Also the Irish government decided that the ratification process could continue in spite of the result.

Ireland delayed the coming into force of the Single European Act and the internal market by six months because of a legal challenge to how constitutional its mode of ratification was, in the Crotty case in 1987. 

The Irish citizens voted "No" first time in a popular referendum on the Treaty of Nice on 7th June 2001 and thereby blocked the ratification process - all new EU Treaties must be ratified in all countries to come into force. Ireland was the only country to let the Treaty of Nice be put to a vote.

The government secured continued Irish neutrality, introduced a system of parliamentarian control and organised a special forum for discussing Irish EU policy. With this background, in October 2002 a second referendum was held under different rules and with a different question. 62.89% of the votes were now in favour of ratifying the Nice Treaty since another "No" was presented as a rejection of EU enlargement.

Notes

Ireland had the EU Presidency the first half of 2004.

Links

Irish Government http://www.irlgov.ie  

Irish official websites http://www.europarl.eu.int/enl......er_states_links_en.htm#ireland