We owe it to Europe to vote No to Lisbon rerun Sunday, June 21, 2009 By Vincent Browne The dignitaries at the European Council meeting in Brussels over the last few days may have been encouraged to concede the Irish demands on protocol and declarations by opinion poll indications of how Ireland will vote in the re-referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in a few months. If so, they reckoned without Dick Roche.
On his very own, Dick has the capacity to switch hundreds of thousands of votes from Yes to No. Indeed, the dignitaries should have known that Dick had already begun his campaign. He was on RTE radio one morning last week and must have turned around tens of thousands of votes in his first campaign outing. Just think of his towering impact as the campaign heats up in early autumn. Awesome.
Then there is Brian Cowen to be reckoned with. He can turn around quite a few votes on his own as well, and hundreds of thousands of votes when joined by his government colleagues.
And then the torpedo. Cowen with Enda Kenny, Eamon Gilmore and John Gormley in a joint appeal to the Irish people.
We are talking of an avalanche here. From a two-to one majority in favour of the treaty, Dick, Biffo, Inda, Eamo and Gors can turn it around in a few short weeks. Even shorter if Nicky Sarks - the French guy - shows up. Mighty.
There’s been nothing like it since Harry Truman’s presidential victory in the US 61 years ago.
But maybe I am reckoning without Sinn Féin, Mary Lou and Gerry and the peacemakers.
And without the detritus of Libertas. They can swing hundreds of thousands back to the Yes side, given a favourable wind. But hardly enough to deny the No side a splendid victory. They don’t have the clout of Dick, Biffo, Indi, Eamo, Gors and Nicky.
There are a few good reasons indeed to vote Yes in the re-referendum, but you can bank on Dick and his pals to ignore them. Getting rid of the unanimity requirement in several areas of EU competence makes sense, and should unfreeze several initiatives, some of them even worthwhile.
Come to think of it, that is the only positive reason to vote for the treaty on its own merits, but it is not an insubstantial one. There is a side consideration, too. The European Union, as a whole, is going through terrible financial trauma. While the Lisbon Treaty would make almost no difference at all to that directly, a Yes vote would probably boost economic confidence through the EU.
Ireland, which has done so well for so long from membership of the EU, might well express its gratitude by going along with at least the governments and parliaments of all the member states, though not with the people of the member states, most of whom could not care less about the Lisbon Treaty and would scuttle it given the chance.
A variant of this argument is the blackmail one: that we had better vote Yes, or else. Or else we will be put out of the EU; or they will go ahead without us; or there will be a two-tier Europe and we will be relegated to the bottom tier, and so on. We should give short shrift to that one.
But yielding to the entreaties of the governments and parliaments at this difficult time, when a confidence boost is urgently required, is not a slender consideration.
Of course, the Lisbon Treaty does more than extend the qualified voting procedure. There is also the permanent president of the European Council - well, five-year president - which would replace the rotating presidency between member states. To Euro fans, this makes a lot of sense. Rotating the presidency is absurd, they claim, especially since this ensures that mutton-heads get to hold the presidency every so often and we can’t have that any more.
Precisely because of the disregard this initiative represents for member states, it should be resisted. But there is another reason to resist it. It is that the rotating presidency keeps at bay - somewhat at least - the concentration of power within the EU among the Germans and the French.
It is a certainty that whoever got the job of president would be a safe pair of hands and, after all the damage that safe hands have done around the world, a bit less of that would be nice, thank you.
Resisting the foreign minister proposal is also a good idea. Far better to have a diffused foreign policy, or none at all, rather than one dictated by the Germans, the French and the Brits.
But one of the main reasons for opposing this Lisbon Treaty, in my view, is that it is a con job. It was devised to get through the essence of the EU constitution, which was defeated by the people of France and the Netherlands, and would have been rejected by the peoples of several other states as well.
To get it through by the subterfuge of so disguising its nature that governments would be able to claim it did not need the ratification of their people. We are being asked to hurry up and get it right this time around, so that the prospect of the British people having a say is removed, since they certainly would say No. If the Tories get into power in the coming months, they will have a referendum on the treaty.
There is a further reason. For the first time, via the Lisbon Treaty, the ‘dogs-of-war’ European armaments industry, has got its mitts on the EU via the European Defence Agency, and we should have none of it. Not just ‘we, the people of Ireland’ but ‘we, the people of Europe’.
We might owe it to the governments and parliaments of Europe to vote Yes this time, but there is a higher obligation to the people of Europe to vote No again. That is the decision that must now be weighed up by the Irish people.
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