NO VOTE INCREASES TO 35% !!
The release of the latest Irish Times/TNS MRBI poll results rocked the political elite in Leinster House, Friday, 6 Meitheamh/June 2008, as the poll showed a dramatic slide in the ‘Yes’ vote on the Lisbon Treaty from 46% support in February to only 30% this week and an equally dramatic increase in the NO vote from 18% to 35%. This is an unprecedented collapse of support, in a few weeks, of any Referendum proposal put to the people since the Constitution, Bunreacht Na hÉireann, was adopted in 1937.
SHAMBLES
Last week, in an example of the shambles of the pro-Treaty supporters campaign, consternation broke out in the ‘Yes’ side with newly elected Taoiseach, Brian ‘Biffo’ Cowen attacking pro-Lisbon parties Labour and Fine Gael for not doing enough campaigning to increase the ‘Yes’ vote percentage in recent weeks. This brought a sharp response by Labour leader, Éamonn Gilmore, and Fine Gael Leader, Enda Kenny, splitting the ‘Yes’ campaign wide open and exposing the contradictions between these parties and their sham alliance in favour of Brussels’s power grab in the Lisbon Treaty. Going by General Election results last year, these three parties represent 85% of the electorate which means that only half their voters are convinced of the empty arguments in favour of this dishonest referendum proposal. Biffo is quite obviously trying to set up Labour and Fine Gael as scapegoats for a defeat in the referendum and avoid the political fall-out from attaching to Fianna Failure and it’s blundering, pig-ignorant campaign. Biffo Cowen, and several ministers have admitted to not even having read the Treaty which they want people to vote for; a shocking contempt for democracy and the intelligence of the voters.
While that shambles was being fought out over the air waves and the press, Biffo, under severe pressure from the Farmer’s organisations to make a statement regarding the use of Veto by Ireland if the WTO trade talks produce results unfavourable to Irish agriculture has been forced to concede the question to the ICMSA at a meeting on Monday, Meitheamh/June 2 and the use of the veto was conceded to the IFA at a tense meeting at Leinster House. The distinct impression, noted by most observers, media and diplomatic, is that of a shambling government in blind panic at this late stage in the Referendum campaign as the spectre of historic defeat on Thursday week looms.
The bluff and bluster of the Yes campaign has fallen apart in spectacular fashion. Despair has set in various quarters, especially in the Brussels elite who are seeing their plans for more power accruing to them vanish by the minute. Conceding to the Farmers organisations has put Cowen in the position of risking an official NO vote by SIPTU, Ireland’s largest Trade Union at their meeting this week, having rejected SIPTU’s demand that the government bring in legislation to guarantee collective bargaining for Trade Union members, within Irish Law, which Cowen rejected last week. Now he has been seen to publicly cave-in to the Farmers, Trade Unions must be wondering whether they count for anything in Cowen’s view of the world.
Despite all the lies, deliberate misinformation, the threats, bullying and predictions of disaster if the ‘Yes’ campaign was defeated, the people have shown that they will not be intimidated by the likes of the CockRoche, government Minister for European Affairs, who has been desperately trying to divert attention from the actual proposals in the Lisbon Treaty and chase the hares of supposed “punishments” for Ireland if we dare to vote NO, and the constant emphasis on the alleged massive benefits Ireland has received from EU funding.
Nevertheless, as the discussion level has increased, the bluff and bluster of the ‘Yes’ campaigners coupled with a hectoring, bullying attitude by almost all of their spokespeople, the voters have had the sense to see that they are being railroaded into voting for an unworkable, unwanted load of gobbledegook which is just a cover for increasing the power of the bureaucrats at the centre of the EU administration in Brussels.
The Trade Union movement is also split on this referendum with ICTU officials recommending ‘Yes’ and individual unions taking both ‘Yes’ and NO positions. Trade Unions and the Labour Party who have decided to support this Treaty have as their main plank, the so-called “Charter of Fundamental Rights” which is attached to the Treaty as a declaration of aspirations but not given any legal force or process of jurisprudence despite being described as “legally binding” by supporters of the Lisbon Treaty.
The Charter “rights” are nowhere concretised in the Lisbon Treaty and are not enforceable in any court. In fact, they are several times countered by other articles giving supremacy to national laws or EU objectives as stated in the treaty. So, in no way can these rights be described as “fundamental” except in an aspirational sense only; you can’t have a “fundamental” right that is restricted by other laws and directives. By this dishonest sleight of hand the Commission bureaucrats create the illusion of rights being available in the Lisbon Treaty by mere mention only but, not enforceable, while the economic structures of markets, banking and currency, free movement of capital and labour and free competition are all given concrete form and enforceable diktat under EU created bureaucratic law .
The Law is what I say it is….
In the “Irish Times”, 27 Bealtaine/May 2008, Ruairi Quinn, former leader of the Labour Party, criticises ‘NO’ campaigners for focussing on legal cases of which they “have little or no understanding” in the European Court of Justice in arguing that the Court is not favourable in its judgements in any way towards the rights of workers in the EEC. The case most quoted being the recent “Viking” case
But, in another “trivial” case as long ago as 1964, eight years before we joined the then EEC, the ECJ ruled, confirming a similar judgement a year before in 1963;
‘By contrast with ordinary international treaties, the EEC Treaty has created its own legal system which became an integral part of the legal systems of the Member States and which their courts are bound to apply. By creating a Community of unlimited duration, having its own institutions, its own personality, its own legal capacity and capacity of representation on the international plane, and more particularly real powers stemming from a limitation of sovereignty or, a transfer of powers from the States to the community, the Member States have limited their sovereign rights and have thus created a body of law which binds both their nationals and themselves…..It follows that the Law stemming from the Treaty, an independent source of law could not, because of its special and original nature, be overridden by domestic legal provisions, however framed, without being deprived of its character as Community law and without the legal basis of the Community itself being called into question. The transfer by the states from their domestic legal system to the Community legal system of the rights and obligations arising under the Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights, against which a subsequent unilateral act incompatible with the concept of the Community cannot prevail’.
(Case6/64 Costa v. ENEL(1964) CMLR 425)
The notable thing about this judgment is that there is NOTHING in the Treaty of the EEC which declares Community Law to be superior to National Law and the ECJ had made law on its own volition without any authority whatsoever. We are now expected to believe that this so-called “Court of Justice”, which it is no such thing, as our High Court and Supreme Court are here in Ireland, but an economic bench of arbitration only, and an adjunct to the Brussels bureaucracy, will be the stalwart defender of worker’s rights throughout Europe? If you believe that, you might also believe in the Tooth-Fairy.
DECEIT
Senator Eugene Regan S.C., of Fine Gael, in a letter to the “Irish Times”, Monday, Meitheamh/June 3rd claimed that by signing the Accession Treaty in 1972 and amending the Irish constitution in the subsequent referendum, Ireland had “signed up” to this decision of the ECJ. Now, Senator Regan is an experienced lawyer and has also worked in the Commission Offices in Brussels as Chef de Cabinet for former Irish Commissioner, Peter Sutherland, so he knows that a contract in which implications for one of the contracting parties is concealed from view or not actually written in the substantive document containing the articles of agreement cannot be valid. Yet, he persists in making these claims in public as part of Fine Gael’s ‘Yes’ campaign.
Later this week, Wednesday, Meitheamh/ June 4th, when challenged on this matter at a public meeting in Dún Laoghaire, Senator Regan failed to answer the question by evasion and further attempted to muddy the waters by implying that because there was “nothing new” in the Lisbon Treaty that hadn’t been part of the previous amended Treaties, of Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice that the legal status of Irish v. EEC Laws remained the same. In his initial statement at that public meeting Senator Regan failed to inform the audience that the Lisbon Treaty created a new legal entity called the “European Union” and formally replaced the “European Economic Community” of the previous treaties. Again, when challenged, Senator Regan was forced to admit these provisions in the Lisbon Treaty but, tried to play down and reduce the significance of it. The establishment of the “European Union” as a legal identity does create an entirely new situation. It creates a new “citizenship”, which was not in existence previously, alongside national citizenship of the member states which is everyone’s birthright. The are obligations attached to this new citizenship which have implications for the future of everyone which have not been debated or addressed by any of the supporters of the ‘Yes’ campaign. Another example of the deliberate obfuscation and deceit which has characterised the whole campaign of the ‘Yes’ side in this debate.
It is quite clear that the main articles of the Lisbon Treaty give total leeway for the privatisation of essential public services such as health, education, transport and domestic water supply. Privatisation and competitive bidding of the public sector services does not, in fact, lead to free competition but to its opposite; capitalist monopoly economy. Particularly in the circumstances of the European Union concentrated ownership, labour costs are pushed down in the name of supranational stabilisation controlled by the European Central Bank, which is not answerable to any government or political authority. And once again, the purchasing power of wage earners weakens while unearned incomes of stock options and bank credit manipulations increase astronomically.
The political scene is now a wide open one in this Referendum campaign; the smug, self-satisfied politicians of Leinster House, the government which wanted to give themselves fat salary increases this year, equivalent in some cases, to an entire years wages for an ordinary worker, now have to get up off their asses and actually work to get some kind of positive response to their blundering, shambling campaign. Having announced the date of the Referendum as 12 Meitheamh/June this year they now have only one week to go not only to reverse their decline but, build a majority vote for their dishonest proposal. We believe that they will fail to do this, but, it is now imperative that the forces of the Left on the NO side must do everything they can organisationally and personally to get the true message across about the reality of the consequences for democracy in Europe if this Treaty gets approved. No scaremongering, no unrealistic promises, just the plain facts are all that is needed to defeat this dishonest Referendum proposal.
The ‘Yes’ side have not produced one piece of evidence of a positive benefit to Ireland if we accept this flawed Treaty. They have ducked and woven on all occasions when challenged on either the facts of the wording of the Articles or the admissions of Barroso, Giscard d’Estaing or even Blank-Cheque Bertie himself that this Treaty was the previous EU Constitution proposal with only minor cosmetic changes. This constitution was rejected by France and the Netherlands and neither those countries nor the EU collapsed. Life went on and they did not lose any of the benefits or funding they were entitled to under current EU rules.
Contrary to the lies of Cowen, the CockRoche and others, the Irish ‘NO’ Campaign is being followed with great interest by the populations of our EU neighbours, denied their democratic rights to vote on this Treaty by the “democratic” EU Bureaucracy and is receiving massive support from all over the EU from ordinary people who are looking to us to defend democracy for everyone and rout the Bureaucrats and their plans for dictatorship in Europe.
Demand Democratic Vote for ALL peoples of Europe on the Lisbon Treaty!!
VOTE NO to 4th REICH Modern Fascism!!
Abolish Warmongering NATO military alliance with Washington!!
FearFeasa Mac Léinn
Áth Cliath/DUBLIN, 07 Meitheamh/June 2008.
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