The Irish Referendum

The Irish rejected the proposed Treaty of Lisbon drafted by Eurocrats and their vote is causing a lot of kerfluffles. For example the German interior minister commented "Of course we have to take the Irish referendum seriously," Wolfgang Schäuble said in an interview with the German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag. "But a few million Irish cannot decide on behalf of 495 million Europeans." The plain truth is that they cannot but virtually every time the politicians have allowed this complex, confusing document to be reviewed by the people who will live under it, it has been rejected. Some have suggested that they create a two tiered European community - those that have accepted the document and those that have not.

You will remember that Constitution that was so soundly rejected - thousands of pages and tons of detail. No one probably read that nonsense. When the Constitution acquired the stench of day old garbage the eurocrats developed the treaty which is a mere 260 pages. The eurocrats evidently thought since this is a treaty and not a constitution we do not need to engage the people. But the Irish, in their original adoption, required these types of things to be submitted to the voters. That was wise.

Ultimately, what the Irish vote suggests is that the inevitability of a Eurocratic system which tries to unite by dictate will not work and those nations with a strongly developed sense of democratic debate and discussion (and also those not cowered by the eurocrats) will be resistant to these types of orderings. One voter summed up the sentiments of those voting no "We're told we can vote no, that the system requires unanimity. But when (a `no' vote) actually happens, every time, the EU tells us: You really only have a right to vote yes," said Dublin travel agent Paul Brady, who voted against the treaty. "You know, I love traveling through Europe, but I don't really want to live there all the time. I'd like to stay as close to America as Europe."

The treaty divides responsibilities into three areas - those where the EU has exclusive competence, those with shared and those areas of mutual support. From my reading of the third area, the mutual support offers a great deal of additional possible powers to the central EU when the officials in Brussels think they want to do more or where they think the individual states have not done enough. Those are awfully slippery slopes which the Irish chose to reject. Hooray!