RONAN MULLEN, an independent senator, is to be appointed to the Oireachtas committee reporting on the Lisbon treaty referendum.

Both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael favour his inclusion because Mullen can speak for conservative Catholics, who are said to have opposed the Lisbon treaty in June.

The senator will propose measures to ensure that Irish policy on “sensitive social issues” such as stem-cell research will not be overridden by the European courts.

Mullen confirmed his interest in joining the committee yesterday and said that Catholic opposition to Lisbon was about much more than concerns over the introduction of abortion.

“There is a sizeable body of people out there . . . who want to be able to make their own call on sensitive social issues,” he said.

“Roe vs Wade [the defining American legal precedent on abortion] was imposed on 50 different states across the USA and it is still reverberating 30 years later because they resent the imposition of a federal standard contrary to the values of so many of those states.

“There is a lesson we should learn — that an overly centralised Europe interferes too much . . . and cuts across the social values [of individual states].”

Mullen and a Sinn Fein representative — likely to be Aengus O Snodaigh — will be the only members of the 11-strong Oireachtas subcommittee who supported the No side in the Lisbon referendum campaign. His nomination at the invitation of Micheal Martin, the foreign affairs minister, is expected to be approved by independent members of the Seanad this week.

A former press officer with the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin during Archbishop Desmond Connell’s tenure, Mullen won a Seanad seat on the National University of Ireland panel last year.

Another expected nominee to the sub-committee said TDs and senators would want to hear the views of theologians and tax experts on concerns of No voters such as abortion and Ireland’s right to maintain a low corporate tax regime.

The sub-committee’s draft terms of reference ask it to report on Ireland’s future role in Europe, a question likely to raise suspicions among No campaigners that this is an attempt to shift the debate away from the Lisbon treaty to the wider question of EU membership.

Religious concerns about Lisbon were first raised by Sean Brady, the archbishop of Armagh. He criticised the EU for promoting secularism and suggested that its hostility to religion may have prompted some Irish voters to reject the Lisbon treaty.

Brady said a succession of anti-family, anti-life and other anti-Christian decisions by Brussels had made it more difficult for committed Christians to maintain their instinctive support for Europe.

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