FINE Gael will attempt to wrest leadership of the Lisbon campaign away from the government next month by proposing a constitutional referendum to protect Ireland’s tax autonomy.

Enda Kenny will finalise a list of ideas to rescue the Lisbon treaty at his party’s gathering in Limerick next month. Wordings for a referendum on tax sovereignty will be discussed at Fine Gael frontbench meetings in the next two weeks, and the text will be launched at the party’s annual autumn think-in on September 17.

Senior party sources say the proposal is to have a vote on a tax sovereignty amendment in tandem with a second poll on the Lisbon treaty. This would only occur if Ireland secured declarations from other EU leaders that addressed voter fears on issues such as abortion and the loss of our European commissioner.

Fine Gael has already rejected a government offer to set up a special parliamentary commission on Lisbon, insisting that political discussion go through the existing Fine Gael-chaired joint committee on European affairs.

Kenny assembled a team of legal advisers in July to examine a way forward from June’s Lisbon No vote.

The group’s deliberations will feed into the frontbench and parliamentary party meetings, with the intention of finalising the party’s Lisbon strategy before the recommencement of Dail committee hearings this week.

Lucinda Creighton, Fine Gael’s director of elections in Dublin for the Lisbon campaign, said: “There is a need to promote our autonomy or sovereignty in relation to taxation and that has to be looked at.

“We have never had anything of that nature in the Irish constitution and there is no reason why we should not be looking at that now. There is nothing to preclude this being addressed in the constitution.”

Government officials, particularly in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Irish ambassadors to the 26 EU member states, have been engaging with international colleagues about Lisbon. Brian Cowen and Micheal Martin, the foreign affairs minister, travel to Brussels tomorrow for talks about South Ossetia and Georgia, and they are expected to discuss Lisbon with colleagues in the margins of the meeting. David Miliband, the British home secretary, will meet Martin in Dublin on September 10 for discussions that will be dominated by Lisbon, and Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech foreign minister, will be in Dublin later this month.

A government spokesman said the results of detailed research into the reasons for the No vote in June will be analysed in the coming fortnight and published in mid-September. One official said the results, though still being collated by Millward Brown, were broadly similar to the findings of an earlier Eurobarometer survey which examined the reasons for the No vote.

The Millward Brown study apparently shows that concerns about possible military conscription for Irish citizens to an EU defence mission weighed more heavily on voters’ minds than the earlier research suggested. The study will also implicitly criticise the government, claiming that its Lisbon campaign did not properly inform voters on the issues before them.

Sinn Fein has said it will engage with a post-Lisbon analysis in the European affairs committee but will be demanding full membership of the body for its Oireachtas members during the Lisbon discussions. None of Sinn Fein’s TDs or senators hold full membership and Mary Lou McDonald, an MEP, has the right to attend but not to vote.

Lisbon hearings are likely to begin soon at the committee, which is chaired by Bernard Durkan of Fine Gael, or in a special subcommittee with added membership from the Oireachtas.

Government sources indicated last week that there was now little or no chance of holding another referendum on Lisbon in the spring or summer of 2009. That means autumn of next year is the earliest possible date when the question could be put before voters again.

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