13.6.2008
(1) Irish Republican News, (2) Sunday Business Post
Friday, 13 June, 2008
Thursday, 12 June, 2008
Sunday, 8 June, 2008
Lisbon Treaty rejected
By Irish Republican News
In a shock for both the Irish and European political establishment, the European Union's Lisbon Treaty has been defeated in Thursday's 26-County referendum.
The final results have shown the treaty was rejected by 53.4% to 46.6%. Turnout was a high 53.1%, at the highest levels of similar European referenda in Ireland.
Justice Minister Dermot Ahern conceded the vote shortly after midday on Friday as tallies came in from around the country showed the treaty had been defeated in an overwhelming number of constituencies.
Political leaders and the international media were present when the result was confirmed by election officials in Dublin Castle this evening. There were jubilant scenes among young 'No' campaigners, who chanted, sang and waved banners as the result was read out.
Ireland ranks in surveys as one of the EU's most pro-European states, and 'No' campaigners have been keen to point out that the vote is not a rejection of the Union.
However, they pointed to the anti-democratic nature of the the treaty, which was was itself an effort to resurrect an EU constitution which was rejected in referenda by French and Dutch voters in 2005.
The treaty had the backing of the three main political parties in Ireland, which has prospered under EU membership. Farmers groups, businesses, churches, labour unions and the mainstream media also backed it.
However, in the end, support was mainly limited to Dublin's wealthy suburbs. The east of the country was closely divided, while the west, south and north were clearly against the treaty.
European bureaucrats were struggling today to come to terms with the result. The need for both the Treaty and the direction of the European project to be re-evaluated had clearly not been taken on board by international political leaders who commented this afternoon.
"Ireland will for sure find a way to ratify this treaty," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters. French officials insisted work on the treaty would continue, while the British government has said their plans to ratify the treaty would go on regardless.
However, the Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore, who backed the treaty, accepted it was now "dead" and there was no possibility of a re-run. Such was the outcome for the Nice Treaty of 2001, which passed almost unchanged in a second referendum after initially being rejected. The high turnout on Thursday, and the major public debate which took place in the latter weeks of the campaign, indicate a profound problem for Lisbon Treaty supporters.
Sinn Fein's Mary Lou McDonald said it would be impossible for Irish leaders to wriggle out of the referendum result.
"This is a moment of democratic truth here. Do you listen to the people or don't you?"
She said that the Taoiseach Brian Cowen would have to get the treaty negotiated.
Copyright © Irish Republican News 2008
Ireland speaks for Europe
By Irish Republican News
Irish voters are being urged to go to the polls today to say 'No' to runaway plans by the European bureaucracy to create a superstate at the expense of Irish sovereignty and neutrality.
Over the course of a short and intense campaign, the 'Lisbon Treaty' has emerged as the very last opportunity for citizens in Ireland -- or anywhere in the European Union -- to force a rethink of a system which ultimately seeks to usurp the interests of 27 individual nations while expanding aggressively eastwards.
The Lisbon Treaty allows for untrammeled and continual revisions to European law which would override checks and balances to expand the superstate project and create a European Army, a European Tax and a centralised European Government.
But despite 36 years of membership, European 'integration' has not helped to resolve the problems of partition on the small island of Ireland, where two administrations, two currencies, divergent economies and a litany of cross-border bureaucratic problems remain.
Hopes by officials in Dublin, London and Brussels that the Irish electorate would take their word for it and approve the lengthy and confusing Lisbon Treaty document, without seeking to understand the consequences -- as clearly shown in leaked emails -- have proven badly wrong.
The numerous questions that have been raised by the electorate have met only with shrugs and threats from the aspiring European oligarchy and the Irish establishment.
Campaigners have pleaded with voters to take the time to head to the polls and VOTE NO before the close of polling at 10pm tonight.
Despite polls indicating that the result could be close when votes are counted on Thursday, there are hopes that a surge of support for the 'No' campaign will continue.
RENEGOTIATE?
Sinn Fein MEP Mary Lou McDonald called on people to come out in massive numbers to give the government a strong mandate to re-negotiate the Treaty and get a better deal for Ireland.
"We are the only people in Europe to have a vote and it is important that as many people as possible come out and vote," she said.
"This is an opportunity to give the government a strong mandate to re-negotiate the Treaty and get a better deal for Ireland.
"Regardless of what happens tomorrow Ireland's place in Europe is secure and co-operation with our European partners will continue. The electorate needs to decide if the Lisbon Treaty a bad deal for Ireland and is it possible for the government to get a better deal.
"If you think the Irish government can do better - Vote NO."
Meanwhile, the French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner warned Irish voters would be "the first victim" of a rejection, which he said the European Union would simply ignore.
"Yes, they're not happy because maybe nobody told them that Europe is confronting the rest of the world and that to have advantages for themselves, for the Irish . . . well, Europe has to develop, has to go in the direction of the Treaty of Lisbon.
"Everyone is going to ratify it," he insisted. If Ireland votes No, Dr Kouchner said the forthcoming French presidency of the European Union would continue to pursue implementation of Lisbon in any event, while "trying to convince the Irish.. to put this treaty back on the drawing board".
CAMPAIGNS
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, who canvassed in Dublin on the last day of the campaign, pointed out that there were "tens of millions of people across the EU who have been denied a vote and who oppose this treaty".
And he said the Dublin government had been "unable to explain how the loss of vetoes, opening of health and education to competition and undermining of workers' pay and conditions could be a good thing"
Meanwhile, disgruntled Green Party leader John Gormley heaped criticism on the other 26-County establishment parties for failing to involve him in a final press conference.
He described as "regrettable" the decision of the two parties to reject his approach to join Tuesday's major joint 'Yes' campaign conference with Fianna Fail.
There had been suggestions that the Greens' failure to obtain support for a 'Yes' vote among members, and the anti-treaty stance of their former MEP, Patricia McKenna, would have overshadowed the event.
However, Mr Gormley said he had "no idea" why he wasn't allowed to participate.
Sinn Fein is the only party in the Dublin parliament to oppose the treaty, but the campaign has seen the emergence of a number of strong grass-roots organisations. These include the People's Movement, set up by Green Party "dissident" Patricia McKenna with other activists, and Richard Greene's Coir, the group acknowledged to have the best posters of the campaign.
On Saturday, Coir and other anti-treaty campaign groups gathered outside the GPO building on O'Connell Street in Dublin, the site of the 1916 East Rising. and unfurled a banner, which read: "People died for our freedom. Don't give it away. Vote No."
In front of the banner, three people dressed in monkey suits danced to foot-tapping music blaring from a portable sound system.
"Like the three monkeys, the new Europe will not see you, hear you or speak to you," said Greene.
"If Lisbon is passed, we lose control not only of our taxation issues, but also workers' rights issues and family and social issues."
At the end of the campaign, McKenna urged voters not to succumb to aggression in the final days before Thursday's Lisbon referendum.
She said that there was nothing in the treaty that will benefit the Irish people.
"It clearly benefits the bigger countries and the more powerful in Europe," she said.
Copyright © Irish Republican News 2008
Analysis: Ireland can once more save Europe from the Dark Ages
By Tom McGurk for the Sunday Business Post
Welcome to the most surreal week in the history of Irish politics.
First, on Thursday, four million Irish citizens resident in the Irish Republic will be asked to ratify a new democratic structure for the European Union and its 500million citizens. Despite the fact that this proposed structure will radically alter the relationship between all the member states and the union, and between all the citizens and the union, it apparently does not require the votes of the other 496million or so citizens. Such is European democracy.
Second, the treaty document that the Irish are required to ratify has proved to be almost unintelligible and, according to opinion polls, remains a total mystery to many ordinary voters. This week, thousands will go to the polls to radically alter the nature of the state they are living in, with no idea of what they are voting for or against. Such is European democracy.
Third, apparently if the four million reject Lisbon, it falls through for all 500 million. But then, on second thoughts, maybe not. After all, the Nice Treaty was rejected, but the question was re-asked until the answer was Yes. The constitutional forerunner of this Lisbon Treaty has already been rejected by previous referendums in France and Denmark. So if the Irish vote down the treaty, will it fall? The problem is that nobody is sure about that; Europe does not easily take No for an answer. Such is European democracy.
Fourth, given that all of this extraordinary political exercise is supposed to be about the establishment of new democratic structures in the European Union, shouldn't alarm bells be ringing already? How more democratically surreal can you get, I ask? (As they used to say: Chinese and Russian papers please copy.)
Sadly, this is only the beginning of our problems, because even what is intelligible in the treaty is deeply concerning. For a start, the constitutional implications of Lisbon have been almost totally ignored in the debate so far.
The first two sentences of the amendment we are being asked to pass requires serious consideration. They read: ''The state may ratify the Treaty of Lisbon signed at Lisbon on the 13th day of December 2007, and may be a member of the European Union established by virtue of that treaty No provision of this constitution invalidates laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the state that are necessitated by membership of the European Union, or prevents laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the said European Union or by institutions thereof, or by bodies competent under the treaties referred to in this section, from having the force of law in the state."
In other words, Europe pre-Lisbon and Europe post-Lisbon are two entirely different political and judicial jurisdictions. This first sentence of the constitutional amendment states that the state may ratify the Treaty of Lisbon and ''may be a member of the European Union established by virtue of that - Lisbon - Treaty''.
This post-Lisbon EU would have the same name, but would clearly be a different union from the pre-Lisbon EU, which stems from the 1993 Maastricht Treaty. The second sentence of the amendment would then give the constitution of this post-Lisbon union supremacy over the Irish constitution as regards its ''laws, acts and measures'', so long as these are provided for in the treaties. So we are not simply restructuring Europe to cater for the logistical demands of the 27 states: rather, we are creating a new European Union superstate based, not on Maastricht, but on Lisbon. I think the European federal state is looming here.
When you then add to these constitutional changes the changes in voting, the elimination of vetoes in some areas, the proposed new community-wide structures in justice, policing and defence, the changes in weighted majority voting, and the new relationship between aggregate population and voting power, the European Union we now live in disappears over the horizon.
Effectively, Lisbon gives the new union a unified constitutional structure so that all areas of government would come within its aegis, either actually or potentially. The only major feature of a fully developed federation the post-Lisbon Union would then lack would be the power to force member states to go to war against their will. Were Lisbon a reasonable and authentic attempt to regulate a 500 million population with 27 states in the union along more efficient and democratic lines, nobody could oppose it. But what is being sold as a mere refurbishment exercise is actually a total restructuring: the relationship between national parliaments and the EU power centre, and the relationship between domestic law and European law, are utterly transformed. And, of course, Lisbon is but another snapshot of the inexorable political progression of the Eurocrats, seizing every opportunity to design a United States of Europe.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a European superstate run by Eurocrats who are unsackable, founded on a treaty that is unintelligible and watching the democratic linkage between citizen and state disappear under oceans of verbiage. I don't believe the architects of this treaty, people like Valery Giscard D'Estaing or Guiliano Amato. I think they are practised political truth-massagers, - and tax-free ones to boot. As Amato himself said at the LSE last February: ''The good thing about not calling it a constitution is that no one can ask for a referendum on it."
The arrogance and dishonesty of the Yes campaign, too, have been deeply depressing, as if somehow the need for workers' rights, charters of fundamental rights, an end to cross-border sex trafficking, climate change and global warming somehow cannot be dealt with except in the context of Lisbon. Such nonsense is mere camouflage for the fundamental structural change between citizen and state that Lisbon is creating.
Over and beyond all of this, there is the growing tyranny of Europe's obsession with environmental and gender politics, its secularisation and multicultural agendas, its interference with national immigration policies and, above all, its failure to combat the relentless transformation of our society into a mere marketplace. Imagine a future in a Euro superstate almost entirely at the mercy of free market forces.
Come to think of it, if we defeat this referendum, it won't be the first time that the Irish rescued Europe from the Dark Ages. I am pro-European, but I also want to remain primarily an Irish citizen, not a mere statistic in a European superstate. Therefore, I am voting No.
Copyright © Sunday Business Post 2008