Ireland is pressing ahead with an ambitious enlargement agenda, insisting it still wants Montenegro to finish its EU accession talks during Dublin’s presidency of the bloc.
An intergovernmental conference between the small Balkan state and EU member countries is set to begin in Luxembourg this evening, with Minister for European Affairs Thomas Byrne in the chair.
Montenegro is expected to close three additional negotiating chapters at the meeting, a step that moves the country further along the accession pathway.
With those chapters concluded, Montenegro will have wrapped up 21 of the 35 chapters required in total.
These chapters are the building blocks of the process, each one designed to bring a candidate state into line with the EU’s body of laws.
“It’s our ambition to close all of the chapters by the end of our presidency,” said Minister Byrne.
“We’re still on track for that, but it’s going to be very difficult. It depends on Montenegro. It also depends on the member states as well.”
Mr Byrne said he also hoped member states could hold two further intergovernmental conferences tomorrow — one with Ukraine and another with Albania — if two more “clusters” of negotiating chapters can be closed.
“We’re making a lot of progress on accession on the enlargement file, which we put down as a key priority of our presidency,” Mr Byrne told reporters.
“There’s a lot of work to do between now and Christmas [on Montenegro’s accession], but if we’re not there the full way, we’ll be almost there. A lot depends on Montenegro themselves, on the work that they have to do to reach the standards that the EU expects, and then the member states have to be satisfied with that too. So the work continues, and I think today is a good sign of progress.”
