Nicholas Sarkozy, the French President, was working with EU leaders and diplomats to plan a special "legal arrangement" to bypass the referendum rejection.

In a joint statement with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the French leader insisted the treaty was "necessary" for the EU and would go ahead.

Mr Sarkozy assumes the rotating presidency of the EU next month, and at a summit in Brussels next week he and Mr Brown will insist that the ratification process continues unchanged.

British sources said that the summit is likely to conclude that the Irish vote is a problem for the Irish government, not the rest of the EU.

"The Irish government will have to go away and think about how to proceed, but the rest of us will keep going," said a Foreign Office source.

"The treaty is alive, and we should now try to find a solution".

There is no doubt that there will be attempts to bypass the decision of the pools in Ireland.

The French Minister for European Affairs is saying the same:

In France, senior officials insisted that, whatever the Irish outcome, other European countries must continue their procedures to approve the treaty.

“The most important thing is that the ratification process must continue in the other countries and then we shall see with the Irish what type of legal arrangement could be found,” Jean-Pierre Jouyet, the French minister for European affairs, told LCI television. He did not specify what form this legal arrangement might take.

“We cannot take a country out of Europe that has been there for 35 years,” Mr. Jouyet added. “But we can find specific means of cooperation.”

It is clear that some decision makers will try to bypass the Irish vote.