Madam, - A few days ago I heard someone fumbling to push an item through my letter-box. I found an envelope addressed to me in large capital letters.
Within was a photocopy of the back page of a recent issue of Alive!, the quasi-political freesheet which, inexplicably, the Roman Catholic Church in Dublin gives apparently uncritical access to its premises.
The excerpt requests support - in terms of both money and prayer - for a campaign to save Ireland from "a Godless Empire which dictates our values" - the EU, I was surprised to learn!
The Lisbon Treaty is described as "a deceitful attack on our freedom and our values" which "allows the Irish Constitution to be overruled whenever our EU masters decide" and which removes our right to decide on issues such as abortion and euthanasia.
Of course these statements are quite simply untrue and intended to mislead the readers of Alive! Who, I wonder, is being deceitful?
The motivations of those who publish such blatant distortions of the facts about the EU and the Lisbon Treaty must be questioned. And one must conclude that an Ireland where views and attitudes to the truth exemplified by this kind of material are accepted and supported - and offered legitimacy by the church - would be a very cold country for any rational and tolerant man or woman. - Yours, etc,
TONY BROWN, Bettyglen, Raheny, Dublin 5.
Madam, - I am a frequent reader of Vincent Browne's articles, which I generally find thought-provoking and interesting. However, his "unanswerable" advice that the Irish electorate should vote No to the Treaty of Lisbon is based on a clear mistake on his part. Mr Browne's basic position is that we should vote No because "we are being asked to endorse amendments to a compendium of previous treaties, without having this compendium available to us". We are being asked to do no such thing.
What we are being asked to vote on in the Treaty of Lisbon is simply a series of amendments to the EC Treaty and the Treaty on European Union. It is as straightforward as that. Mr Browne's impression that there is a "Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union" somewhere out there to which even diligent citizens have no access and which constitutes some kind of "compendium of previous treaties unavailable here" is simply wrong. The mysterious "Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union" he refers to is nothing more than the new name which is to be given to the EC Treaty as amended by the Treaty of Lisbon. (See Article 2(1) of the Treaty of Lisbon).
Contrary to his assertions, the Treaty of Lisbon is both capable of being understood and very far from being "gobbledegook". It is certainly long and complex, but solutions to problems which are themselves long and complex can hardly be otherwise.
His point that the Lisbon Treaty "is intelligible only by going through it and all the other EU treaties at the same time" is also not entirely accurate. (Incidentally, insofar as it has any truth, exactly the same could have been said about the Treaties of Amsterdam and Nice, and the overwhelming bulk of the Treaties of Maastricht and the Single European Act, all of which took exactly the same approach as the Treaty of Lisbon, and all of which the Irish electorate have endorsed in referendums). Both the EC Treaty and the Treaty on European Union are available in their existing forms from the Government Publications Office or (free of charge) online at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/index.htm#founding. The form which these Treaties would take after the Lisbon Treaty reforms, is also available: the Institute of European Affairs, for example, has published a compendium available in print and (free) online at http://www.iiea.com/publicationx.php?publication_id=33.
Furthermore, for the layperson, eminently comprehensible guidelines have also been produced, such as that produced by the National Forum on Europe, available (once again free of charge) online at http://www.forumoneurope.ie/index.asp?locID=442&docID=-1.
I hope this will assist in clearing up any confusion. - Yours, etc,
Dr GAVIN BARRETT, Senior Lecturer in European Law, School of Law, UCD, Dublin 4.