THE French Foreign Minister, Mr Herve de Charette, said yesterday that the European Union's conference on institutional reform had got off to a bad start and needed a big push to get back on track.
"The intergovernmental conference needs a big push," he said on RTE television. "We have spent over a year going around in circles like whirling dervishes . . . and we have not made even half a centimetre of progress."
"It is time to get serious on this subject, because we were given a mandate to complete these negotiations and adopt the necessary changes by June 1997."
The conference negotiations are intended to update the 1992 Maastricht Treaty which created the European Union as the EU prepares to expand eastward.
EU leaders are to meet in a special European Council in Dublin on October 5th in an effort to revive the conference, which many in the 15 member bloc believe has become bogged down.
Mr de Charette said he was counting on the Dublin summit to revive the process. "As usual, the French and the Germans will work for that hand in hand," he said.
All was in order for the shift to a single European currency from 1999: "Everyone is justifiably convinced that this single currency will see the light of day on the agreed date," he said.
There was interest in the system "even in England", where the Conservative government typically was strongly critical of moves that ceded sovereignty to the EU.
Countries wishing to participate in the single currency, to be called the euro, must meet tough budget targets next year in order to qualify.
. The far right French leader Mr Jean Marie Le Pen stepped back yesterday from an earlier open embrace of racial inequality but lashed out anew at the government, branding it a wicked and incompetent system of mafiosi.
"I never asserted the global superiority of one race over another," Mr Le Pen said at his National Front's annual Blue, White and Red Festival.
"As a humanist and a Christian, I believe in the moral principle of the equality of man in dignity. As a politician and leader of a national and republican democratic movement, I respect equal rights and the duty of citizens to each other set out in our constitution," he told cheering supporters.
"As a citizen with freedom of expression, I observe that there are deep differences between men and groups of men, and I intend to continue to express myself as I see fit," he said.
The Front said 50,000 people attended the weekend festival while police estimated the crowd at 12,000.
Mr Le Pen set off a national furore last month when asked at a press conference whether he believed in racial inequality.
"Yes, I believe in racial inequality, certainly, it's obvious," he responded at the August 30th event. "All of history demonstrates it. They do not have the same capacity to evolve."