Analysis: Irish PM center stage in EU 'pantomime'

LONDON, England (CNN) -- There is often an air of theatrical unreality about EU summits. This one seems to be the Keystone Cops Meets Othello, or any other tragedy you care to name.

Poor Brian Cowen, the taoiseach or Irish prime minister, is the ghost who only has to appear on stage to cause a collective shudder at the pain he carries with him like a shroud.

The others all want him to explain how the Irish, huge beneficiaries of the European Union, could have been so ungrateful as to vote down the Lisbon Treaty, the latest attempt to provide them with a streamlined constitution fit for purpose for an organization of 27 countries.

Sadly for them, Cowen doesn't know, and may never do so for sure. Concerns about traditional Irish neutrality, business taxes, abortion laws, trade talks, the loss of a permanent European Commissioner, may all have played a part.

So, he now seems to be admitting, did fears about the Irish economy. And many have told pollsters that it was fear of the unknown. They didn't want to vote for a treaty they simply didn't understand and were worried their leaders didn't either.

The other EU presidents and prime ministers say that the voting down of the treaty is now a Europe-wide problem which must be solved by all. But that hasn't stopped them pressurizing the Irish into being the first to come up with a solution.

Ideally they would like Cowen to come back to their October meeting with proposals as to how Ireland is going to solve this "communal" problem. But without knowing what precisely caused the No vote, it is fiendishly difficult for him to draw up a shopping list of concessions which which might persuade the Irish to relent in a second vote, let alone to be sure of getting them.

Publicly the others offer Cowen the consoling shoulder hug they might accord to a bereaved relative. Then they rush off into the next room to mutter about his carelessness in charge of the life support machine and assure themselves the apparently deceased Lisbon Treaty is only in cold storage.

Openly they have to insist that the democratically expressed wishes of the Irish electors must be respected. Privately they are straining every sinew to see that expression of opinion is reversed at the first possible moment.

What they are cursing the Irish for above all else is thrusting them back into discussion of constitutions and institutions. They have spent so long navel gazing that most of them have penetrated well into the internal organs. They don't like what they see and they know the public loathe them for it.

That is why the summit has produced a flurry of other initiatives designed to show that the EU leaders really are outward-looking citizens of the world -- a condemnation of Zimbabwe election violence here, a U.S.-baiting relaxation of (pretty well non-existent) sanctions on Cuba there.

They are also of course parading their concern on spiralling food and fuel prices, to show that they really do care about the things which hurt their citizens. These soaring prices, said Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in a "we feel your pain" late night appearance, are creating a new kind of poverty.

The EU has to meet its citizens' worries on this issue, he insisted. And, no the EU isn't stopping any of its nations trimming excise duties on petrol or imposing windfall taxes on fuel companies to help combat the new poverty. That is all a misunderstanding. So long as any measures are in accord with the EU's long term aims of curbing energy demands, that is fine, he explained.

So is there agreement on what should be done? No, yet again there is a tension. Populists like the French President Nicolas Sarkozy want to have European VAT rates lowered on fuel. He and Spain and Portugal want to ladle out subsidies to fishermen, truckers and pensioners.

Others like Denmark's Anders Fogh Rasmussen are suspicious of too much tinkering with free markets while the tougher environmentalists like Finnish Prime Minister Martti Vanhanen don't want them to lose sight of the need to reduce demand for energy and find more alternative energy supplies.

Cue for much rushing about the stage, plenty of hushed whispers in the wings, and very little concerted action.

Every pantomime, of course, needs its Good Fairy. And for once it is the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who has been cast in that role. After he deliberately turned up late last December for the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, the other leaders called the seemingly semi-detached Brown "Grumpy Gordon." Now as the prime minister who refused to take the opportunity to put a skewer through the heart of the Lisbon Treaty after the Irish vote, but instead drove on Britain's ratification process to gain royal assent in Britain for it the day the summit opened Brown is seen in a new and favourable light -- if only temporarily. "Courageous" says Sarkozy.

And the Pantomime Dame on this occasion? Surely that has to be Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire who is back as Italy's prime minister. Berlusconi declared in an interview before making his summit reappearance that the EU leaders were losing power and were a less charismatic collection that when the was last in power alongside the likes of Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroder, Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar.

How that went down with those worthy successors Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is anybody's guess. But if anybody finished up at the official dinner with salt spilled into his pudding it would be no surprise if it were Berlusconi.

As they used to say of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, there was never any world situation so bad that a few well chosen words from him couldn't make it a hundred times worse.

All About European Union • Ireland • Jose Manuel Barroso • Brian Cowen