INTRODUCTION

In recent months, in defiance of the lessons of history and in supine obedience to German interests in Europe British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has repeatedly moved against Poland and Spain (two supporters of his Iraq war!). The British Government continues to support Germany in that country's breaking of the rules of the Euro's Growth and Stability Pact and has not once objected to Germany's disgraceful attacks on the Czech Republic as the Nazi-collaborating Sudeten Germans seek to undo the post Second World War settlement. The break up of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and German claims to land in Poland are attempts to also undo the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which ended the First World War.

Anthony Coughlan's article below (which concludes with a brief description of the eurosceptic cause in Ireland) shows how the Irish Government is also siding with the traditional aggressor in Europe - against Poland. This is a sad recreation of the grotesque collaboration with the Nazis by some of the Irish political class during the Second World War. The President at the time, De Valera, even went to the German Embassy at the end of the war to sign the condolences book on the death of Hitler!

Poland and Ireland have something in common - they are both strongly nationist and Roman Catholic. But as both countries are finding out the European Union does not allow them to fulfill the wishes of the Vatican for a "united Europe" and maintain their democratic nationhood! As Anthony Coughlan points out the Irish Prime Minister is breaking the convention that the Presidency of the EU should remain neutral. Bertie Ahern supports the fascist idea that because Germany has a "large population" and pays most into the EU coffers, such power should therefore buy more power in the form of votes!

Ahern's dismissal of the voting system which he himself previously regarded as "essential" is a measure of the crawling subservience to German Europe which now characterises the Irish Government.

DUBLIN

Ireland's Prime Minister Bertie Ahern is openly siding with Germany in pressurising Poland to change its position on its Nice Treaty voting rights, so as to make possible the re-founding of the European Union on the basis of its own State Constitution. He hopes to open the way to this at the EU summit meeting in three weeks time. The Irish Prime Minister is thereby flouting the convention that the holder of the EU Presidency should be neutral and impartial between its Member States on issues that are in dispute between them.

On 9 February Taoiseach Ahern told the German news magazine, Der Spiegel: "Schröder's position is sensible. The fact is that Germany has a large population, Germany makes a large contribution to the EU - and that must be reflected in voting system."

On 26 January he said in Davos, Switzerland: "If people just stick totally with Nice and don't move at all, you can't do that because it's not going to be satisfactory to Germany. There's a fair amount of sympathy for the German position because they are a large country, they are a big part of the paymaster. We need to look very helpfully at the German position. I have to try and get movement from those who need to move and at the same time not try to put it in a way that forces them beyond a position they can explain to their own people and their own parliaments."

Yet Prime Minister Ahern was the man who pushed through the Nice Treaty in his own country in 2002 by saying that the voting system it proposed was "essential" for EU enlargement, and was the best system for EU law-making in a 25-Member EU! If the EU were a single State for a real European "nation" in which Poland, Ireland and the other EU members were provinces, the population-based voting system demanded by Germany and France for an EU Constitution would be justified, for Germany's 85 million people would entitled it to greatest influence. (Although many countries, like the USA for instance, make sure that their upper house gives equal weight to all the States, regardless of their populations - ed)

If the EU is NOT to be one State, but a partnership or alliance of constitutionally equal States, then it is right that Poland and Spain should have similar voting weight to Germany - indeed that smaller countries than either of them should have that too. Inside the virtual EU Federal State which the Draft Constitution envisages, Germany can look forward to being joined in due time by Turkey, with its 75 million population, whose admission to the EU Germany champions. At present Germany and France between them have nearly 40% of the population of an enlarged EU. Under the Draft Constitution this would enable these two States to block whatever EU laws they do not want and, with some allies, to push through whatever EU measures they do want. They would effectively dominate the EU.

The population-based system for making EU laws that is proposed in the draft EU Constitution - viz. using a 60% population headcount - would turn the existing river of EU legislation into a flood. It would greatly increase the volume of laws and rules coming from Brussels. This is why the EU Commission and European Parliament desire it, for their power derives from their role in EU law-making.

Ireland's Prime Minister is working for an agreement to recall the Intergovernmental Conference to adopt an EU Constitution at the EU summit meeting in three weeks time. The Draft Constitution proposes to repeal every jot and tittle of all the EU treaties up to now, from the Rome Treaty (1957) to the Treaty of Nice (2003). It proposes to re-found the EU as a new legal and political entity on the basis of its own Constitution, which will have primacy over national Constitutions and law in all the main areas of public policy.

Is not the proposed repeal of all the EU treaties a good opportunity to re-examine existing EU policies - for example the EU fisheries policy, the Common Agricultural Policy, Euratom, the militarization of the EU, the Brussels Commission's mania for harmonising everything, the unwillingness to repatriate back to national parliaments a single power that has been taken by the EU Institutions in their 47 years' existence?

Are people so happy with all the existing EU policies as to agree to make them part of an EU Constitution which they and their children and grandchildren will henceforth willingly obey?

Anthony Coughlan
March 2004

PS I am afraid there is no prospect of any of the major Irish political parties
opposing the proposed EU Constitution. Nor is there any sign of a new party being formed that could make significant inroads on public opinion with the EU issue.

The two political parties in the Republic of Ireland that are opposed to the EU to some extent are the Greens and Sinn Fein. Between them, thay have 11 members out of the 166 in the Irish Dail(Parliament) and will probably gain several more in the next general election. There are also some EU-critical Independents; so one might say that roughly 18 out of 166 members of the Dail are EU-critical.

In Northern Ireland the two Unionist Parties, led by David Trimble and Ian Pasisley repectively, are of course EU-critical. Sinn Fein does not bother raising EU matters north of the border. The bulk of EU-critical sentiment in the South is not organised or articulated by, or reflected in, the stand of the parties mentioned. There are a number of non-party EU-critical bodies and the bulk of people who are opposed to or sceptical about the EU are of course not organised in any party.