If this morning’s flight from Brussels to Dublin is an indication of how Irish people will vote in Friday’s referendum on the EU’s Lisbon reform treaty, then the result will be an emphatic Yes on Saturday afternoon when the final results are expected to be known.

The majority of the Aer Lingus flight packed with Irish diaspora from Brussels - some of who hold office in the EU capital - seemed set to vote Yes to the Lisbon treaty, which aims to give the 27-nation bloc greater sway in world affairs and streamline its decision-making.

Irish MEP (member of the European Parliament) Liam Aylward said he was “quietly confident” of a positive vote in favour for the treaty.

The Fianna Fail politician from Ireland’s eastern region was accompanied on the flight by his British Liberal colleague Andrew Duff, who was among the lawmakers who helped shape the new Lisbon treaty after French and Dutch voters rejected the EU’s doomed constitution in 2005.

“I am travelling to Dublin because I want to hear from the people themselves, whether they vote Yes or they vote No. I am not going to make any predictions,” Duff said.

Irish voters rejected the Lisbon treaty in a referendum in June 2008, plunging the bloc into crisis and halting its expansion.

Polls ahead of Friday’s plebiscite pointed towards a victory for the Yes camp this time around after the Irish government received guarantees from its EU partners in the sensitive areas of military neutrality, taxation, abortion and the right to retain an Irish commissioner in Brussels.

Many of those on board the flight are employed by the European Commission, European Parliament or Ireland’s representation to the EU and so had personal reasons for making the trip to the Emerald Isle to vote.

“My career could take a turn for the worst this weekend if we don’t vote Yes,” a Commission official said, but asked not to be named.

“How could you apply for a promotion, take home a decent salary from the EU after voting No. It would be really embarrassing and hypocritical.”

But not all had ulterior motives for voting Yes.

Carol McGinley, who runs the Brussels office for Ireland’s main dairy organisation, and Anne-Marie McCourt, assistant to independent MEP Marian Harkin, both faced at least a three-hour journey by bus on landing in Dublin, before casting their vote in their respective constituencies.

“I just had to vote. Every vote counts. I felt a real duty to vote, especially after last time,” Carol said referring to Ireland’s first referendum on the treaty in June 2008 which resulted in victory for the No camp.

Even the few nay-sayers I could find among the 130-plus on board the flight, seemed resigned to defeat.

“I am a staunch opposer of the treaty, but it looks like the tide is against us,” said Brian Carty, who works for Sinn Fein — the only mainstream political party opposing the treaty.

“You can never say never, but it looks like a Yes vote this time around.”

(Picture: A man adjusts an Irish flag as it flies next to a European Union flag near the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels. Reuters/Francois Lenoir.)

 Pat Cox, Joseph Borrell, Hans-Gert Poettering and now Jerzy Buzek. What do they have in common ? For those outside the EU bubble in Brussels, Polish conservative Buzek was elected on Tuesday as the new president of the European Parliament, following in the footsteps of the others mentioned above.
    But does anyone really care ?
 I asked on Facebook if anyone could name the previous two presidents and from those of my friends who do not work in any of the European Union institutions, I received numerous responses ranging from Barack Obama to Seamus & Sheila McSpud.

 In his first media interview after taking over as the head of the EU’s directly elected assembly in 2007, Poettering told me he was going to make the European Parliament one of the best-known legislatures in the world.

 Poettering’s closeness to German Chancellor Angela Merkel was supposed to give him a greater voice and increase parliament’s influence over EU legislation, notably on climate change and financial regulation.

 But even with greater media coverage of the EU’s co-legislature, notably of the committees responsible for these important areas of competence, June’s election still resulted in a record-low turnout and further diluted public opinion of the parliament.

So, can former Polish Prime Minister Buzek — the first assembly president from a former Soviet bloc country — succeed where his predecessors failed and put the European Parliament on the international map ? I doubt it.

European Union officials are thinking the unthinkable — they could hold a summit in July, during the normally sacrosanct summer break set aside for Brussels’ Eurocrats.

Diplomats say there is mild panic in the EU capital at the thought that the regular June summit — where the bloc is due to discuss the Lisbon treaty reforming the EU — could be chaired by Eurosceptic Czech President Vaclav Klaus.

The idea is that it would be better to postpone the discussions on the treaty until July, by which time Sweden will have replaced the Czech Republic as holder of the EU presidency.

Prague has not yet confirmed which of its officials will chair the June 18-19 Brussels summit after the collapse of the Prague government last month. But Klaus, who has described the Lisbon treaty as an irrelevance, could try to do so.

The aim of the Brussels summit is to agree a set of assurances to Ireland that the Lisbon treaty will not undermine its sovereignty — a move intended to help Dublin win a second referendum on the text slated for October.

Treaty backers say it will streamline the functioning of the 27-nation EU and give it a stronger voice in the world, for example by creating a more permanent EU president. 

Some of them say it would be better not to have Klaus trying to broker a deal to rescue the treaty if the summit talks become difficult. 

Others give the idea of a July summit short shrift. Sweden itself is not keen. Ireland has described the debate as”speculative conversations” and would prefer to get on with it.

“Postponing it until July causes significant difficulties,” Foreign Minister Micheal Martin said of the packed domestic Irish political calendar leading up to the referendum.

It looks like Brussels’ bureaucrats may get their July break after all.

 Barely noticed, the United States sent a top diplomat to  Europe this week to seek help on an important commitment by President Barack Obama — to close the Guantanamo Bay prison.
   
The trip by veteran envoy Dan Fried to Brussels and Prague is part of efforts to persuade European states to take in some of the 241 remaining detainees at the prison, synonomous for many with rights abuses in the “war on terror” under U.S. President George W. Bush.
   
Europe has long called for the jail to be shut down, but only a few countries — such as France, Portugal and Albania — have  volunteered to resettle any inmates from third countries such as Afghanistan or China.
   
 Time is steadily running out if Obama is to achieve his goal of clearing and closing the prison by next January.  A perceived  lack of European help could sour the much-vaunted new start in transatlantic ties which both sides say they want.
  
But many European officials are asking why they should help the United States out of a hole it dug itself into.
   
The main problem does not involve the small number of  so-called high-value  terror suspects in the camp — they will remain in detention and Washington does not seriously expect anyone to come forward and take them off its hands.
   
Nor does it involve the 17 detainees who have already been cleared for release. The really hot issue is the fate of  the remaining detainees who are not high risk but have not been given the full all-clear.
   
 European officials fear the affair could turn into a legal and political nightmare. Who will take which detainees? Given that much of Europe is now border-free, how will one country reassure its neighbours if it agrees to resettle inmates? And doesn’t the fact that European states have different national policies on surveillance and detention pose extra problems?
   
Worse still, the political fall-out could be devastating. If , for example, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner carried out an attack in Germany just before an election this year, how would Chancellor Angela Merkel explain it to voters? 

Washington knows it won’t be easy to get the Europeans on board. But it says it would be hypocritical for Europe now not to help after all its criticism of Guantanamo.

It also points out that some of the Europeans who are now raising concerns over security were not so long ago saying  most of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners were innocent.
   
Washington hopes to encourage EU justice and home affairs ministers to at least agree a common line on the need to help it with Guantanamo at a regular meeting scheduled for June. Then it will approach individual countries for negotiations on resettling specific cases.
   
Is it time for Europe to come forward and help Obama or is this one file on which it is advised to stay clear?

    There is a growing feeling of “fin de siecle” in Brussels  these days, a sense of degeneration, of euro-depression.
    But people across the European Union do not seem to care.

    The collective EU leadership is widely seen as weak and demoralised and the Czech government has collapsed in the middle of its six-month presidency of the 27-nation bloc, an unprecedented event that is bound to leave much unfinished business before an election to the European Parliament in June.

    Nobody knows what the EU’s institutions are going to look
like in the future, with the Lisbon treaty that is supposed to
reform them in limbo.

    The executive European Commission and the parliament are in
transition, the former avoiding difficult decisions and debates
for fear of harming the treaty’s ratification. As a result, an
important debate on EU budget reforms can’t even get started.

    The global economic crisis is forcing governments to take
extraordinary measures that do not always coincide with EU rules
but the Commission seems to turn a blind eye in some cases. But
then, the EU has always been good at fudging.

    There are also plenty of signs of EU enlargement fatigue.

    But do people care? Judging by a poll this week, the answer
is no.

    The Eurobarometer poll showed turnout in the election
could be the lowest ever. Only 34 percent of EU adults are
certain they will vote, a sign of no-confidence in the EU 
institutions.

 A “fin de siecle” should offer hope of rebirth, a new
beginning. It’s hard to feel any at the moment. The EU’s
bureaucratic machine will lumber along until better times come.
But how much does anyone care?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent a clear “I told you so!” to the United States and Britain at the weekend, criticising them in unusually frank terms for resisting measures that might have contained the current financial crisis. The conservative leader of Europe’s largest economy reminded her partners that she had pushed for steps to boost the transparency of hedge funds during Germany’s presidency of the Group of Eight last year. ”We got things moving, but we didn’t get enough support, especially in the United States and Britain,” she told the Muenchner Merkur newspaper. Merkel expanded on her point in a speech in Austria, suggesting that both Washington and London were only now coming around to her view.

“It was said for a long time ‘Let the markets take care of themselves’ and that there is ‘no need for more transparency’…Today we are a step further because even America and Britain are saying ‘Yes, we need more transparency, we need better standards for the ratings agencies’.

Germany had made greater transparency a key theme of its rotating presidency of the G8, which includes the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. Berlin had expressed fears that hedge funds could threaten the stability of the financial system through their heavy reliance on borrowing to finance risky trading strategies. But it ran into resistance from the United States and Britain, achieving little.

Whether Merkel’s G8 initiative could have averted or limited the current financial market crisis if it had been successful is certainly debatable. But reminding voters that she had sought to address the problem as early as last year could help Merkel score points on the domestic front ahead of a general election next year. Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) rule in an uneasy grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), and both sides have been trying to play up their own role as crisis manager in the current financial market turmoil.

Both Merkel and her SPD finance minister, Peer Steinbrueck, have tried to take credit for Germany’s efforts last year to agree better transparency rules for financial markets. SPD budget expert Carsten Schneider praised Steinbrueck’s efforts during Germany’s G8 presidency in a newspaper interview on Monday, adding: “At the time, the United States and Britain demonised every effort to agree more transparency and rules.”

As Germany’s election approaches, the “I told you so!” Berlin seemed to send to Washington and London on the weekend could turn into an “I told you so first!”-competition between Merkel’s CDU and her SPD rivals.

Imagine driving a car with 27 people on the back seat trying to steer. That’s the image Peter Mandelson painted of his role negotiating at the World Trade Organisation on behalf of all European Union countries - some of which are not entirely supportive of the way he is taking things.

Although the EU gave the trade commissioner a negotiating mandate for the crunch talks under way in Geneva, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, hardly Mandelson’s greatest fan, said he would not sign up to the deal on the table.

Not only does Mandelson have to put up with public barbs from the French leader, he also has to report back daily to national EU delegates who have followed him to Geneva to ensure he keeps to the mandate they gave him. In his blog, Mandelson says it will increasingly be the case in the EU that member states will have to learn to keep quiet and let their representative do the talking.

“There is no question that the decision to negotiate collectively in the WTO gives European member states much greater weight in the WTO and the global trading system, but it does require 27 proud diplomatic services to take a back seat to the EU’s negotiators at exactly the moment when every instinct tells them to have a hand on the wheel,” he said.

“It’s a reminder that so much of the modern European experience of foreign affairs will involve developing the habits of coordination that give us a united voice and role in the world.”

The European Commission has been negotiating on behalf of EU member states for many years on big ticket issues like trade and climate change, but with Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty to reform the bloc’s institutions and create an EU foreign policy supremo, do Europeans still relish the idea of Brussels representing them on the global stage?

Is there anything more holding Belgium together than “the king, the football team and certain beers”–  as Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme once said?

Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia have their own political parties and their own television stations and newspapers which on any normal day could be reporting on totally separate countries.

Tuesday was not one of those such days. Following Leterme’s decision to quit on Monday night, Belgium’s media at least agreed on the top story, even if few could answer the question: what next? The days ahead are likely to lead to growing debate over a central Belgian question: is it worth staying together?

Belgium has evolved since 1970 from a unitary state to a federation in five phases of devolution giving regional and linguistic parliaments control over education, culture,
transport and housing.

The Flemish majority want more, from powers to set their own job creation schemes and to vary rates of tax. French-speakers fear that Belgium will be nothing more than an empty shell and the economic divide between rich Flemish north and their depressed south will widen.

Leterme’s Flemish Christian Democrats had promised change, but his failure to broker a deal led to his resignation. Opinion polls are notoriously volatile, but a recent poll of Flemings found that more than 49 percent would welcome the country splitting in two.

Even many Flemish who want a united Belgium struggle to say why, often citing the enormous headache that division would cause — how would the national debt be split and what would happen to Brussels, the largely French-speaking capital within
Flanders?

During the last political crisis, less than a year ago, the capital Brussels saw a burst of colour as patriotic Belgians hung the national flag from their windows and balconies.
French-speakers are mindful of the economic impact of losing their richer northern neighbours, but they too are losing patience.

The demands of the two communities could simply be incompatible and the question remains — is Belgium ungovernable and incapable of reform?

It should all be music to the ears of top military brass in Brussels, Washington and at the United Nations, who have long been struggling to fill gaps in under-resourced peacekeeping missions from Africa to Afghanistan.

Although the total number of mission-fit French forces will fall to 30,000 from 50,000 under the plans, the idea is that they will be better equipped, more mobile and better able to respond to everything from terrorism to cyber-attacks.

That is what defence wonks mean when they talk about “transformation” of the world’s large but mostly lumbering standing armies built up during the Cold War.

Paris promises a win-win deal for NATO and the EU. Not only will it play a bigger role in the transatlantic alliance whose military structures it quit four decades ago, but it also sees scope for more pooling of Europe’s scarce defence resources.

Too good to be true? Perhaps.

Who gets priority if both NATO and the EU come knocking on France’s door for soldiers? Will the British agree to a French call for the EU to have its own military planning cell?

It is all very well for Sarkozy to revive an nine-year-old dream of the EU to have a 60,000-strong reaction force on call for crises around the world. But that came to nought the first time because nations didn’t cough up the troops — who is to say they will be any keener to do so this time around. Britain’s The Times newspaper has its doubts.

Have your say.

Each side accuses the other of trying to scare voters ahead of Ireland’s referendum on the EU treaty on Thursday.
“No” groups have campaigned on issues ranging from abortion and euthanasia to taxation and Ireland’s military neutrality. They also say new decision-making mechanisms mean small states will lose influence and get trampled by the EU’s heavyweights.

The government’s response is to accuse treaty opponents of scaremongering by campaigning on emotive and extraneous issues that will not be affected by the treaty.
In some cases neutral voices are inclined to agree, with the Catholic archbishop of Dublin and referendum commission weighing in to say there is nothing in the treaty that threatens Ireland’s strict abortion and euthanasia laws.
The government warns of “dire consequences” for Ireland’s economy and diplomatic clout if a nation that has gained so much from EU support and subsidies is ungrateful enough to reject the treaty.
The “No” camp accuses the government of bullying, blackmail and exaggeration. Indeed a number of economists say that while a “Yes” vote would be best for future prosperity, rejection of the treaty is unlikely to have any severe repercussions.
So who is the biggest bully in the playground? Or is it just an inevitable flaw in referendums that they become a lightning rod for irrelevant issues and for politicians who don’t trust us to be able to debate the question we’re being asked?