So that’s it then, no more treaties, at least not in the European Union.

I’ll believe it when I don’t see it, but for now, the handful of treaty-drafters based in the pink granite and glass edifice which houses the EU Council of Ministers in Brussels, have laid down their treaty pens and, pausing only to stick pins in effigies of Vaclav Klaus, are now turning to the business of “legalling” other pressing texts, such as the pre-accession statutes for the Balkans and the Directive for the Approximation of Delicious Pudding Standards.

“That’s it for treaties, forever!” someone extremely close to the Lisbon “Amending Treaty” said on the evening of the day on which Irish voters decided they had either got it wrong in the first referendum and corrected it, or that they’d got it right the first time but were fed up with all the fuss and changed their minds anyway.

Mixing, as always, in the right circles, I found myself seated at dinner on the night the result came through beside one of the very few people who can claim to have written, indeed, “drafted from scratch”, as this person put it, quite a few pages of the dreaded document.

It’s not a boast that can be bandied around much beyond the Brussels beltway, for fear of being dismissed as a loony, beaten to a pulp, or subjected to an endless rant about how the Common Market is to blame for everything.

But in the confines of a private dwelling where only a few Euro-nerds and hangers-on have gathered, it seemed to this drafting-type person reasonable to out him/herself as a treaty worker-bee.

“What?” I said. “No more EU treaties? Ever? Surely some mistake?”

For are there not places out there, all across Europe, whose hopes of international recognition rest entirely on the lottery of treaty-naming opportunities? These are places with no hope of ever playing host to the Olympic Games, or even to the Eurovision Song Contest.

But they cling to the belief that, sooner or later, as the great weight of legislative clarity which binds us all together inextricably grows in direct proportion to the number of pledges that red tape is being cut, the name of their city will gain a bizarre immortality.

This belief flows from the spin-off benefits for Maastricht of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which established the “European Union”, and which should not to be confused with the Treaty of Maastricht of 1843 which established the border between Belgium and the Netherlands.

In many ways the latter was more far-reaching and important, but the former put Maastricht’s name in lights as the begetter of an accord which ushered in a single currency and, crucially for treaty nEUrds, created the notion of the “three pillars” structure, which sounds dangerously close to Da Vinci Code territory.

Thus was Maastricht’s name spread abroad, and many noble seats of learning and industry plonked themselves down in the town as a direct result of its world-wide expos......