Bertie Has Handed Everything
Pearse Won Over to the EU
says Anthony Coughlan

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible' - 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and his colleagues will be claiming this Easter Week to be the heirs of Patrick Pearse and his fellow rebels, who proclaimed an Irish Republic outside the GPO 90 years ago.

But is today's Irish Republic of which Bertie Ahern is Taoiseach, where two thirds of its laws are made these days by the European Union in Brussels, really a State where the people of Ireland exercise the right to 'the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies', to quote the words of the Easter Proclamation?

The German Ministry for Justice announced recently that between 1998 and 2004 some 23,167 legal acts were adopted in Germany, of which 18,917, or 80 per cent were EU directives or regulations.

Presumably Ireland, being a unitary rather than a federal state like Germany, would have a higher proportion of domestic national laws rather enacted centrally; so it seems plausible to assume the EU makes two-thirds or so of our laws rather than the 80 per cent there.

Powers
Having to obey laws made mostly by others means being ruled by others. It is the opposite of a country being independent, sovereign and democratic.

What role do the Irish State and the Irish People actually have in making EU laws? We have one member out of 25 on the EU Commission, the body of nominated, non- elected officials, which has the legal monopoly of proposing all EU laws. That is four per cent influence. We also have one minister out of 25 on the EU Council of Ministers, which makes EU laws on the basis of the Commission's proposals.

That is again four per cent influence there. In practice, most EU laws are nowadays adopted by qualified majority vote on the Council of Ministers, Where Ireland has 7 votes out of 345, that is two per cent of a say, and in which it may be out voted in most matters.

The European Parliament may propose amendments to draft laws of the EU Council of Ministers, but it cannot have these amendments adopted without the agreement of the Council and Commission, and it cannot itself initiate any law. The Irish State has 13 members out of 732 in the European Parliament, that is two per cent of a say, and the North has 3 MEPs.

Yet when the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from 1800 to 1921, it had 100 MPs out of 600 in the British Parliament, of which some 70 were nationalists. That gave nationalist Ireland 20 per cent of a say at Westminster; yet the Irish people were unhappy with majority rule from London then and aspired to a parliament of their own in an independent Irish Republic.

As for 'the right of the Irish people to the ownership of Ireland', how can Taoiseach Ahern pretend to have that right when under EU law it is illegal for an Irish government to adopt any measure that would prevent the 450 million citizens of the other EU states from having the same rights of ownership and establishment in this country as Irish citizens, in relation to land-buying, fisheries, residence, employment or the conduct of any economic activity?

In addition to being made subject to laws made overwhelmingly in Brussels, the Government is regularly fined for breaking EU laws by the EU Court of Justice - something no sovereign State anywhere in the world is ever subject to. How is that compatible with 'the unfettered control of Irish destinies'?

Sanctions
EU membership means that member states lose their right to sign trade treatise with other states, as this is done by the Brussels Commission acting for the EU as a whole. It means that the member states are legally obliged to work towards a common foreign and security policy and common rules in crime and justice matters.

Last September, a judgement of the EU Court of Justice laid down that the EU can adopt supranational criminal sanctions such as fines, imprisonment or confiscation of assets for breaches of EU law by means of majority vote.

This means that Ireland and its citizens may be subjected in future to such criminal sanctions even if they had voted against them, and for matters they do not necessarily regard as crimes.

Before Ireland joined the EEC in 1973, Article 15 of the Irish Constitution stated that ' the sole and exclusive power of making laws for the State is hereby invested in the Oireachtas: no other legislative authority has power to make laws for the State'. The Irish State was constitutionally sovereign then in a way that is no longer.

Sovereignty
As a member of the Eurozone, Dublin has no control of either the rate of interest or its currency exchange rate, which are economic tools of all independent governments that seek to advance their people's welfare.

As regards interest rates and exchange rate, we have to abide by policies decided by the EU Central Bank in Frankfurt, whose priority necessarily must be the economic needs of the more populous EU countries.

All this is clearly incompatible with 'the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies' proclaimed in the Declaration of the Republic in Easter 1916.

Yet the Taoiseach and his colleagues who have put us under EU rule and who desire to give the EU more power still by ratifying the EU Constitution, proclaim themselves to belong to the Republican Party. On Easter Sunday next, they will perpetrate the hypocrisy of professing to honour the men and women of 1916 against the background of the above facts which make a mockery of their professions. And they will be supported in that hypocrisy by the leaders of the other major Dail parties, who glory in their servitude to EU rule and who equally support the discredited EU Constitution that was rejected by the peoples of France and Holland last summer.
Daily Mail, 12th April 2006

Anthony Coughlan is Senior Lecturer Emeritus In Social Policy at Trinity College Dublin. He is Secretary of the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre.
And in the UK….

EU Rules

SIR, The EU Spokesman, Katherina von Schnurbein explains that the British Parliament can pass any laws it likes but, as Ms Schnurbein puts it, those laws have no effect until they have been approved by the EU. We should be grateful to an EU spokesman for putting the legal status of national parliaments so clearly and unambiguously.

Michael J Rose
Sheffield
Letters to the Editor, The Daily Telegraph, April 2006

Further Resources

The Real Face of the European Union by Phillip Day, video documentary (PAL format only)
Ten Minutes to Midnight by Phillip Day