Madam, - You quote Taoiseach Bertie Ahern as saying in the Dáil: "In regard to France, the Netherlands and several other countries, we have an obligation to pass the European Constitution here" (The Irish Times, April 13th).
Where does this "obligation" come from? What is its character? Who are the "we" the Taoiseach is referring to?
Mr Ahern may see himself as having assumed an obligation vis-à-vis his fellow heads of state and government to seek to ratify the proposed EU Constitution, but surely his first obligation as Taoiseach is to the Irish people under the Irish Constitution. Yet your report indicates also that the Taoiseach is unwilling to rule out a second referendum if a first one should give a No result on the "Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe".
In other words, the Taoiseach is implicitly putting Irish voters on notice that if they do not vote the way that he and his Government want, this higher "obligation" will require a further referendum vote to reverse the first, just as happened with the Treaty of Nice.
If the French people vote No to the EU Constitution on May 29th and the UK Government then abandons its referendum in Britain and Northern Ireland, as Home Secretary Jack Straw has just hinted, will Mr Ahern still persist with a referendum on the Constitution here? The Taoiseach's remark about our "obligation" to adopt the EU Constitution reveals a mindset among Government Ministers and aspiring Ministers right across the EU, whereby they identify more and more with the supranational rather than the national level of government. As a consequence, they get ever more out of touch with their own peoples - as President Chirac may well discover in France.
What is the cause of this historically unprecedented disjuncture? I suggest that the fundamental reason why so many national political leaders take a wholly uncritical view of EU integration, including the proposed Constitution, is that every transfer of national power to Brussels increases their own personal power at EU level, where they become the primary lawmakers for 450 million Europeans on the 25-member EU Council of Ministers.
At national level Ministers are part of the executive arm of government. To get something done in a particular policy area, a Minister must have a majority behind him or her in the national parliament, and implicitly a majority among the citizens who elect that parliament. Shift the policy area in question to Brussels, however, and that same Minister is transformed into one of 25 members on the EU Council making laws for over half a continent, on first-name terms with the great of the European world, helping to run an embryonic superpower. Little wonder it tends to go to their heads, especially if they come from small countries.
This accretion of personal power to a small number of politicians at supranational level is at the expense of a reduced say for ordinary citizens in the various EU member-states, the loss of their right to decide who will make the laws for the policy areas in question and to elect and dismiss their rulers, for their own governments are no longer such with regard to the supranational policy areas affected.
Not surprisingly, this process is causing a crisis of democracy right across the EU, which the proposed Constitution looks set to aggravate, not solve, if it should come into force. - Yours, etc.,
ANTHONY COUGHLAN, Secretary, The National Platform, Crawford Avenue, Dublin 9.