Britain is pressing on with the tortuous ratification of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, despite Ireland rejecting it in a referendum.

Jim Murphy, the Europe minister, said today the Irish would be left isolated when the other 26 EU member nations passed the treaty into law later this year. The treaty would establish the offices of a European president and foreign minister, and would reduce the power of individual nations to veto reforms.

Gordon Brown, the prime minister, has rejected calls for a referendum on the treaty, but in Ireland, where constitutional law obliged a referendum, citizens rejected it overwhelmingly.

Despite support for the treaty from the main political parties, 53.4% of Irish voters said “no” on Friday. Similar “no” votes from France and the Netherlands in 2005 stymied an earlier version of the document, the EU constitution.

Legally the treaty requires the ratification of all 27 member states to come into force - but Britain has joined France and Germany in signalling that it will look for a way around that technicality.

Jim Murphy said the Irish Government would have to find its own way forward and the Irish vote was not a fatal blow.

“Only those who previously wished to dance on the grave of this treaty, even before the Irish referendum, are declaring it dead,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

The treaty was still good for Britain, he insisted, and the onus was now on Ireland to propose a means of resolving the crisis when EU leaders meet in Brussels next week.

The rest of the EU could proceed with the document in some form without the Irish, he signalled, and would finish ratifying it at the end of this year.

He said: “It is important to reflect then, is it 26 governments who have ratified and is it one that hasn’t? And then we discuss the way forward.”

That way forward is not yet clear. The Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, supported the treaty but says he will not try to second-guess the country’s voters and he had no plans for a second referendum to try to reverse the result.

The Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, said the treaty was finished, since any further ratification was impossible.

In Britain the Conservative Party said the Irish vote was the final nail in the coffin for the European reforms, after the rejection of the previous constitution in 2005.

William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said: “I think our Government should have the courage to say to other European leaders, now we have got to recognise reality.”

He called on Europe to abandon the plans: “It is time to turn away from this whole centralising project and concentrate on things that really matter.”

European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso said the treaty was not dead. France and Germany, too, have urged the EU to press ahead with the project despite admitting that the referendum result was a serious blow.

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