How we could play musical chairs with EU post

IT would be rather easy for the Government to ensure that Ireland retained its EU commissioner under the present EU treaties, at least for the next 30 years.

According to the ill-conceived article four of protocol 10 quietly appended to the Nice Treaty, now that the EU has expanded to 27 member states, “the number of members of the commission shall be less than the number of member states”, and they shall be chosen “according to a rotation system”.

The details of how this would work were supposed to be finalised after the treaty of accession for Bulgaria and Romania had been signed in April 2005, but it seems that was never done.