Convention analysis: Emerging from the convention yesterday, Ireland's representative on its praesidium, Mr John Bruton, suggested that the Government should take a lead in giving unqualified support to the draft constitution. This would, he suggested, offer Ireland an opportunity to return to the heart of Europe after the turmoil of the Nice Treaty.
In fact, Ireland's reluctance to ratify the treaty was among the reasons the convention was called, and the alienation from the EU institutions felt by many Irish voters was among the phenomena the convention set out to address.
At a summit in December 2001 EU leaders agreed on the need for reform. "The Union needs to
. . . resolve three basic challenges: how to bring citizens, and primarily the young, closer to the European design and the European institutions, how to organise politics and the European political area in an enlarged Union and how to develop the Union into a stabilising factor and a model in the new, multipolar world," they said.
The choice of the 77-year-old former French president, Mr Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, to chair the convention raised a few eyebrows, including those of the Taoiseach.
Mr Ahern remarked acidly that Mr Giscard had last held a major office more than two decades ago and hinted that the autocratic Frenchman might not be the right man to reach out to a new generation of Europeans.
The first few months of the convention appeared to justify the Taoiseach's suspicion as Mr Giscard's high-handed manner angered a growing number of convention members.
Federalists muttered that he had a secret agenda to neuter the Commission and to strengthen the inter-governmental Council of Ministers and European Council as the main decision-making bodies.
Representatives from small countries were alarmed by Mr Giscard's repeated assertions that the EU must take greater account of population size and questioned the concept of equality among member-states.
Others grumbled that he ignored the views expressed in the convention and bullied his praesidium into producing draft articles that reflected his own prejudices.
When Mr Giscard leaked his own ideas for reform before consulting the praesidium, many members of the convention asked openly if they were wasting their time coming to Brussels every two weeks and sitting on numerous working groups.
Yesterday, however, many of Mr Giscard's harshest critics acknowledged that he had steered the convention to a successful conclusion in a way that few others could have managed.
Mr Bruton, who has had sharp differences with him in praesidium meetings, was unstinting in his praise.
"You have to say that Giscard d'Estaing had the status, he had the sense of humour and he had the vision to get the result that he got," he said.
That result is one that has satisfied nobody in its entirety but may represent the best possible compromise between the interests of large and small states, federalists and inter-governmentalists and idealists and realists.
It strengthens all three EU institutions - the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament - but it represents a shift of power towards the Council, where member-state governments meet.
The EU will have its own foreign minister, who will have access to the Commission's resources but will be answerable to the Council.
More business will be done at a European level, and national vetoes will be abolished in many policy areas.
But ministers will make decisions in public, and there will be a clearer demarcation between those areas that fall within the EU's remit and those that remain the responsibility of national authorities.
For the first time, national parliaments will have a role in ensuring that the European institutions do not interfere where they do not belong.
Above all, the way decisions are made in the EU will become simpler, with fewer legal instruments and a single treaty to replace the current four.