Reading Chronicle | Opinion | Plucky Irish hold back the EU constitreaty

Friday, 16th May, 2008

Published: Thursday, 1st May, 2008 09:00

Plucky Irish hold back the EU constitreaty

By Maurice O'Brien

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Reading's brightest columnist, Maurice O'Brien

HOW the EU constitreaty conmen must wish they could set the Irish Republic adrift in the Atlantic.

While we’re being steamrollered into accepting the thing, it’s infuriatingly inconvenenient for the gauleiters that 'little’ Ireland is obliged for constitutional reasons to hold a referendum.

Everyone knows full well that the last time the Irish were trusted to stand up for themselves they ungratefully threw out the Nice Treaty.

Equally, everyone knows they were forced to vote again, and only conceded when warned they’d have to keep doing it until they got it 'right’.

Meanwhile the Brussels boot boys, terrified of a repeat, aren’t allowing their counter-offensive to rely solely on sheepish visits to Ireland by the lupine Barroso and Merkel.

A leaked letter from MEP Jo Leiman, chairman of the EU’s constitutional affairs committee, suggests discussing anything potentially controversial in secret, or not at all, until after Ireland votes next month.

The letter concludes: “It would therefore appear highly advisable that any document concerning the implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon which addresses politically sensitive matters be examined only when it becomes sufficiently clear that the Treaty will enter into force.”

And that’s what they’re doing.

Many Irish voters are highly sensitive to attempts to interfere with their taxation system, so Commissioner Laszlo Kovacs’ plan to harmonise the EU corporate tax base is mysteriously on ice until next autumn.

Before Christmas, the draft cross-border health services directive was pulled from the Commission agenda because of “timetable restraints”.

Curiously there couldn’t have been any time pressures at the Commission’s next meeting, because there wasn’t any legislation on the agenda.

And this month’s long-awaited conference on reforming the EU’s fraud-ridden budget and the Common Agricultural Policy has been postponed indefinitely.

Well, you wouldn’t want to be upsetting Ireland’s increasingly militant farmers just before a referendum would you?

Unfortunately, the masterplanners couldn’t do anything to halt Peter Mandelson’s talks with the World Trade Organisation in Geneva this month.

And while it’s got nothing to do with the constitreaty, Irish farmers see it as a Mandy-inspired EU sell-out which will cost 50,000 of them their livelihoods, halve their industry’s 4,750 million euro output, and shave two billion euro off exports. Total Irish losses: four billion euro.

By the way, another little EU leak involves a German plan for creating a database of troublemakers, from environmental and anti-war protesters to council tax rebels, who could be automatically banned from travelling and potentially causing bother elsewhere in Euroland.

The devil may be in the detail but, for all our sakes, please God the Irish will get to see the bigger picture.

- SYMPATHIES to the woman bitten by the rabid dog she rescued from Sri Lanka. But with the RSPCA reporting nearly 150,000 dumped pets in Britain last year the words 'coals’ and 'Newcastle’ spring to mind.

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