Irish Vote Again On European Union Reform Treaty

SHAWN POGATCHNIK

DUBLIN (AP) — The future of the European Union hung in the balance Friday as Ireland's voters decided whether to ratify a treaty aimed at making the 27-nation body more powerful and effective.

Irish voters rejected the Lisbon Treaty last year. A second "no" vote would doom the EU's painstakingly negotiated plans to improve its institutions in an age of rapid eastward expansion and growing challenges from cross-border crime, terrorism, energy needs and ecological threats.

If Lisbon becomes law, more policy decisions would be permitted by majority rather than unanimous votes in European summits and in the European Commission, the EU's executive branch. Those policies, in turn, would increasingly be shaped by the elected parliaments of each nation and the European Parliament, which currently has little say.

Projecting this more decisive EU abroad would be a new fixed-term president — in place of a decades-old system that rotates the presidency among governments every six months — and a new foreign minister.

The treaty can't become EU law unless every member ratifies it. Twenty-four nations have done so, while the Euro-skeptic heads of state in Poland and the Czech Republic are withholding their assent until Ireland's popular will has spoken.