Message from the South East: "No means No"

national | eu | press release Tuesday June 17, 2008 14:49 by O. O'C. - People's Movement (South East Region) info at selisboninfo dot org 086 3150301

If respect for the equality of all EU Member States is to mean anything more than rhetoric, then the general ratification process should have been halted immediately.

Nearly seventy seven thousand voters in the South East Counties of Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford and Waterford voted No in last Thursday’s Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Just over sixty seven thousand voted Yes. Yet already a process is under way to try to overturn the democratically expressed majority will of the people of this region and of the rest of the State.

That is effectively what EU Commission President Barroso, French President Sarkozy, German Chancellor Merkel and British Prime Minister Brown mean when they say that the Lisbon Treaty ratification process must continue despite the Irish referendum vote.

If respect for the equality of all EU Member States is to mean anything more than rhetoric, then the general ratification process should have been halted immediately. For the treaty to come into force, all Member States must be in a position to ratify it according to their individual constitutional requirements and this State is not in a position to ratify the treaty in compliance with the Irish Constitution.

The Commission and the big Member States are already ganging up on Ireland over the referendum result yet a post-Lisbon EU would see those same Member States having a much greater influence in the EU law-making and decision taking processes and Ireland having much less.

The ratification process for the Lisbon Treaty was programmed to guarantee that all the Member States would ratify it. Although in essence a Constitution for a new European Union it was deliberately not called such to ensure that EU governments could slither out of holding a referendum on it for fear that voters would reject it again as they had done to its predecessor in France and Holland in 2005. Ireland has upset the programme because it is the only country where a referendum had to be held because of the 1987 Supreme Court decision in the Crotty case.

In order to lay the ground for overturning the popular will on Lisbon, the leaders of the Yes camp arrogantly set out to rubbish the integrity and intelligence of the No majority and portray it as being made up of the ill-informed, the duped and the unthinkingly discontented. Yet what did No voters reject?

By voting No, voters rejected major constitutional changes for the EU, for its Member States and for Irish citizens. These changes would have given the EU the constitutional form of a supranational European Federal State and turned Ireland and other Member States into regions or provinces of such a Federation. These changes were clear to see in the 28th Amendment to the Constitution but were either glossed over , misrepresented or downplayed by the Yes camp and even more crucially by the allegedly impartial Referendum Commission.

In spite of this, voters made a perfectly rational political decision to reject the Lisbon Treaty. Now that decision has to be respected.

The message from the South East is thus, No Means No.

FOR VERIFICATION AND COMMENT, CONTACT:

KEVIN MCCORRY