(BRUSSELS) - European Union legal experts have been drafted to help break the deadlock over the stalled Lisbon treaty by December, Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen said Thursday.

The suggestion to seek legal ways of assuaging Irish concerns over the text came from the French EU presidency, keen to solve the crisis caused when voters in Ireland rejected the wide-ranging treaty at a referendum last June.

"The presidency has asked the (European) Council legal services to engage with us to see what can be achieved," he added.

It is hoped the experts will be able to take Irish voters' concerns on board and pore over the treaty text to see where any room for manouevre, clarification or reassurance can be found.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said that in December "I should be able to put on the table a proposal concerning Ireland."

He also said he would probably make a new visit to Ireland in the near future.

Cowen has promised his EU partners he would come up with an action plan by December on the best way to move ahead with the bloc's stalled treaty, originally due to come into effect in January.

Irish voters were concerned about perceived threats to defence, neutrality, social and ethical matters, including abortion rights and taxation, he told them.

"We will have to see if some of the concerns that have been expressed can be addressed," Cowen told reporters in Brussels Thursday, at the end of a two-day EU summit.

"We will seek to identify elements of (a) solution and a common approach to be found, that's the challenge that faces us" ahead of the next EU summit in December, he added.

Asked whether Dublin would eventually hold a second referendum to ratify the text Cowen replied, "you are asking me to anticipate the process that we are now engaged in."

However he did recall that Irish voters needed two referendums before finally approving the EU's preceding Nice Treaty in 2002.

"We had a referendum on the last occasion obviously," he said.

Ireland sent shockwaves through Europe on June 12 when voters rejected the reform treaty in a referendum. It was the only country in the 27-nation bloc to hold a popular vote, although all must ratify the text before it can take effect.

Apart from Ireland, only Sweden and the Czech Republic have yet to ratify the text, and they will do so via the parliamentary route.

Cowen spoke of Ireland's need to be fully engaged in the European project, especially in the current times of financial crisis.

"I wouldn't like to think what the situation would have been if we were on our own currency," he said, recalling that the European Central Bank's resources were bigger than the national bank.

The institutional crisis, which recalls the rejection of a full-scale constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005, ruined the original plan to get the treaty up and running by January 1, 2009.

The Lisbon treaty, drawn up to replace the failed constitution, would introduce an EU president and new foreign policy supremo and cut the number of national vetoes in EU voting.

Measures in it are designed to streamline the creaking institutions of the EU, which is now operating under rules designed before the "big-bang" of 2004 which brought 10 mainly ex-communist Eastern European nations into the fold.

EU leaders had pledged to try to ratify the treaty before European Parliament elections next year, but senior European officials have since said they don't expect it to enter into force before 2010.

Fifty-three percent of voters in Ireland rejected the treaty, and Cowen said that many had done so because they could not understand it, while others did not feel concerned by the European project.

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