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Fri 06 Jun 2007The EU charterThe enthusiasm for the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights manifested in the Dáil on Wednesday by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was welcome and has provided some reassurance that Ireland will not seek to dilute its application in this jurisdiction. Mr Ahern insisted that Ireland's formal reservations on protocols to the charter, which it registered last weekend in the mandate for the negotiation of the EU treaty, were merely precautionary and intended to give lawyers a proper chance to look over the effect late-night British textual additions might have on our legal system. "We have no difficulty with the scope and application of the charter," he told TDs.Although the charter - despite its broad sweep of fundamental rights - is intended to cover only the work of the EU and its institutions, albeit in the member states, the British government had become convinced that the European Court of Justice and its own courts might use its provisions to extend workers' rights to organise and strike in workplaces generally. The charter's place in the new treaty was thus one of the red line issues on which Tony Blair had set out to do battle in Brussels. He had hailed as a huge success the summit acceptance of a special British protocol providing that the rights enumerated in the charter would not be enforceable or justiciable in the UK unless already provided for in domestic legislation.