Unlike the majority of Irish people I was a fan of the original version of the Lisbon Treaty when it was proposed as the prospective constitution for the European Union. I quite like being European and I don't have any particular hang up about the various risks that were outlined at the time. You can read a consolidated version of the Treaty here.
The main opponents so far:
- Sinn Fein. They are hardly the politically suspect hard left that they were back in the days when they were the political wing of the IRA but they are a long way from becoming the sort of party that I'd be comfortable voting for. I have yet to fully examine their reasons for asking for a No vote though so I have to admit that right now I'm just suspicious because of who they are, rather than what they are saying.
- Libertas. This is a libertarian think tank (of sorts). It's main players are
- Declan Ganley. A Telecoms entrepreneur with some interesting history. His efforts to get a CDMA based telecoms network installed in Iraq is on its own sufficient reason for me to never trust anything he has an interest in but that's clearly a pet rant of mine. In general he seems to be one of those business men who has spent years dealing with crummy governmental bureaucracies and is now determined to fight back.
- Naoise Nunn. Manager of the Apres Match team and producer of "I Keano" amongst other things. He has worked in or around the Irish Government in the past but I'm not sure what it was he did.
- David Cochrane. Editor and one of the founders of politics.ie and formerly an editor of the online edition of Independent Newspapers. Of the lot I reckon that David has the best credentials when it comes to commenting on this treaty but even so I haven't found any of his arguments on the issue in any way compelling so far.
- Ulick McEvaddy. In general a stand up sort of guy who's company, Omega Air, makes bundles of cash providing in ari refuelling services to the US Air Force and the RAF. He specifically complained that the Treaty was too complex which has to be a joke - I can guarantee you that the contract he signed for his RAF re-fuelling deal was a lot more complex and it's worth a hell of a lot less than the Treaty.
- Kieran Allen. Socialist Workers Party candidate for the imminent election for the General Secretary of SIPTU and founder\owner of VoteNo.ie. Allen's main objection is that the Treaty is a thinly disguised front for a plot to copper fasten principles of neo-liberalism into the structures of the EU. And he has issues about the recognition of collective bargaining that I haven't quite figured out yet.
So far I have a couple of high rolling entrepreneurs who specialise in doing deals with NATO military forces and Cellular Telephony businesses, a comedian, some comrades from the hard left and a blogger. Please feel free to expand on this and\or add any reasons why we should trust any of the above more than all of the remaining political parties and mainstream political commentators in the country. Everyone is entitled to their position but it is reasonable that we ask about everyone's motivations in this. I have very little time for most of the mainstream political parties here in Ireland and they certainly have reasons for wanting to get this thing passed that I probably wouldn't agree with but for the most part I think I agree with the fundamental mesage - this Treaty will make it possible to run the EU efficiently over the coming decades and that is something that is desperately needed. Without it the existing inefficient monster in Brussels and Strasbourg will get worse and it will put back the efforts to make it more efficient (and genuinely more democratic for everyone in the EU) by years.
So far the general range of arguments that I keep seeing are the following:
It's too complicated. Ah come on folks, it can be read by a moderately literate person from end to end in about two hours even if they take the time to understand the rather daft legalese that all documents like this are built on. It's certainly no more complicated than other such treaty and we've passed plenty of them in the past. We let our TD's pass laws that are far more complex all the time and frankly I'd trust the populace at large over any bunch of TD's any day. Many of the claims that were made about the original constitution were along the lines of "IT should have been nice and simple, like the Constitution of the United States". Those are fine and noble words but frankly folks - once you add on all the layers of legalese that the "simple" US constitution needs just in order to function in this day and age it makes the EU Constitution (and the Lisbon Treaty) look anorexic. I'm extremely suspect of those who seek "simplicity" in government - they usually have an agenda that will benefit dramatically from a simpler system that will fail to prevent them profiteering (either financially or politically) in the gaps that simplicity will create.
We lose representation because they are taking away our commissioner. Get a grip, the commissioners don't work for us (as a nation) anyway, or at least they shouldn't and,honestly, using the European Commission in an argument about democratic representation is totally suspect. The loss of a dedicated national commissioner is not a huge deal for me personally - I can't see how the existing or previous Irish EU Commissioners ever really made that much of a difference for me and I certainly can't see Charlie McCreavy ever acting genuinely in my best interest and P. Flynn and certainly never made a decision in his life that I would like to be associated with, Ray MacSharry almost certainly worked to make the CAP and its ilk the monsters they are today and Peter Sutherland may be a nice and affable bloke but I suspect that, like McCreavy, his time in office was probably spent mostly making sure that large business interests were kept happy rather than genuinely making the lives of average citizens on the ground any better. To be perfectly honest I think that it's far more likely that a Swedish (or German, French or whatever) Commissioner would act in my best interests than one nominated by either of the two parties in Ireland that have always nominated such people to the post of "Irish EU Commissioner" in the past. Anyway such arguments completely fail to sway me and I welcome any change that might make the European Commission more efficient. In fact I'm reasonably hopeful that those changes might even do something to improve its already suspect democratic accountability since commissioners will now more obviously have to be very clear about the fact that their responsibilities are to their portfolios and the Union at large and not their countries of origin.
The neutrality issue is also a non runner for me. We have only ever been nominally neutral but even so it has been a useful position in the past. I'm personally very embarrassed about Ireland's original foray into "active" neutrality during WWII as that seems to me to have been a very small minded thing to do given the nature of the war in question. To be sure there were good arguments for the position and it almost certainly prevented many civilian casualties in Ireland at the time but it still seems to me to have been based on very suspect attitudes with regard to allying ourselves with the British so soon after independence. Skipping over to today our position is absolutely not neutral in spirit even if we still have technical locks against military cooperation. Ireland is a US leaning western European democracy of some sort and no amount of posturing about our tradition of neutrality is going to change that. We aren't ever likely to become closely allied with any other grouping short of a major revolution in the country and frankly it's about time we let our army boys play with their buddies in the rest of Europe at a minimum. That said I don't see that the Lisbon treaty makes any material difference here - at it's most extreme interpretation it provides a mechanism for us to opt into a cooperative structure where we would then have a chance to be on the inside pissing out rather than continuing our existing outside pissing in stance. Lisbon on its own isn't going to force us to do that though so frankly all dire warnings to that effect are FUD in my book.
The scare mongering about tax harmonization is another red herring. Much has been made about Ireland's preferential corporate tax regime being the golden goose that helped build the economy over the past few decades. Now there is some truth to that argument but it's far, far less than its proponents make it out to be. The critical aspect of the Celtic Tiger's success was the access to a large pool of cheap educated English speaking labour in close proximity to mainland Europe that was fully integrated into the EMU and subsequently the Euro. The IDA's aggressive marketing and ability to aggressively subsidize FDI via direct grants probably ranks close to the top too although their ability to dole out grants has already been eliminated (while our own Commissioner was in charge of that portfolio no less). A quiescent labour market thanks to the various "Programme for Partnership and Fairness" efforts probably rolls in in third place. Stable (ish) centrist (ish) government probably comes in fourth and after all of that I reckon our fairly low corporate tax rate probably closes out the list of important reasons why Ireland's growth was sustained over such a long period. So yes tax has been a factor but frankly it's importance is grossly overrated. And yet again it's irrelevant because the current Treaty does not provide any mechanism by which national control over corporate tax rates would be eliminated.
