THE ATTORNEY GENERAL will consider whether Ireland will need to hold a referendum on the new European Union deal thrashed in Brussels over the last two days, the Taoiseach has said.
Twenty-six of the 27 European leaders are set to sign-up to a new agreement for their countries that will see greater fiscal integration and new rules on limiting budget deficits to avoid a repeat of the current debt crisis afflicting the likes of Greece.
It is not clear whether the changes will require a referendum in Ireland and today the Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said that the matter will be referred to the Attorney General who will “analyse” and “forensically examine” the deal, RTÉ News reports.
The deal will also see the EU’s permanent bailout mechanism, the European Stability Mechanism, brought forward to next year in a bid to provide the firepower necessary to prevent the debt crisis from spreading to the likes of Spain and Italy who are running large budget deficits and low growth.
The deal will “go some way” towards solving the crisis of confidence in the single currency, the Minister of State for European Affairs Lucinda Creighton told RTÉ’s Six One News this evening.
She didn’t rule out the possibility of a referendum, rating it as having a 50-50 chance of happening.
The two-day summit in Brussels did not appear to yield any progress on Ireland’s push for reducing the cost of its bank recapitalisation programme, the very measure which led to it seeking an EU-IMF bailout.
But Creighton told Six One that the issue was ”very much on the table”.
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