Madam, - On Tuesday Declan Ganley of Libertas repeated his call for the replacement of the existing EU treaties with a US-style constitution. However, he has not explained how this could work. States have constitutions, but the EU is not a state - it is a treaty-based organisation.
If Mr Ganley would like the EU to move away from the treaty structure and become a super-state, he should say so. He could also tell us how the rules in the current treaties would be set out.
Similarly, Mr Ganley has called for the direct election of senior EU positions such as the presidency of the European Council. With such a democratic mandate must come sovereign powers — something that position does not currently exercise. A transfer of further sovereignty in this way to the EU would also be a step towards EU statehood.
There may be merit in EU statehood but without further explanation Mr Ganley's calls sound like empty rhetoric. - Yours, etc,
Madam, - According to your edition of November 19th, Declan Ganley assured an Oireachtas subcommitee that a democratic constitution for Europe could be set out on 25, or even 15, pages. That runs to between 4,500 and 7,500 words.
This sounds like an excellent idea. Perhaps Mr Ganley could favour us with a draft text of such length, say within the next 30 days. He need not include a pompous preamble.
Of course, to be a real constitution, it would have to replace the texts of all the existing treaties.
The old phrase "put up or shut up" springs to mind. Can Mr Ganley put up? - Yours, etc,
Madam, - It is sickening to watch the political bluffing being carried out over the Lisbon Treaty rejection. The Government claims it has listened to the people and we are worried mainly about abortion, neutrality and having a commissioner. In reality, Government members talked among themselves and decided they would tell us that these were our problems and then they would address them with meaningless minor declarations that they believe they can get away with.
The unpalatable reality for them is that years of their lies and deceit, spent enriching themselves and their friends at our expense, have left the electorate both cynical and angry. Put simply, we do not believe a word from these go-boys (and girls). I venture to suggest that if the major political parties had urged us to vote No, the Lisbon Treaty would have sailed through. - Yours, etc,
Madam, - In the immediate aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty referendum, the artist Robert Ballagh compared Taoiseach Brian Cowen to Vidkun Quisling, who ran Norway at the behest of the occupying Nazis.
Well, we now know that the conduct of a sovereign referendum was characterised by misinformation and distortion by "our" foreign-owned press, especially those newspapers in the possession of Rupert Murdoch and, one suspects, the "Irish" outposts of the Daily Mail. We can see clearly the quality of international support Mr Ganley gathers, but can only speculate as to the source of his funding. Similarly, we can only speculate as to the provenance of the substantial amount of cash spent by Cóir.
Moreover, the Irish Anti-War Movement, People Before Profit and VoteNo.ie are fronts for the Socialist Workers' Party, a body not known for dissenting from their "fraternal" comrades in London. Yet every time the European Commission clarified any matter (ie corrected a straightforward lie), it was lambasted for "interference" and, as a matter of course, "bullying".
Does this represent a triumph for globalisation, internationalism or hypocrisy? - Yours, etc,
Madam, - Déirdre de Búrca's essay on how we might learn to stop worrying and love the EU (Opinion, November 19th) gets off to a bad start when she refers to "its well-deserved reputation as a strong promoter of democracy at an international level." Among the regimes most warmly embraced by the EU are those of Georgia (run by the increasingly authoritarian and possibly psychotic Mikhail Saakashvili), Colombia (run by drug traffickers and death squads), and Israel (run by war criminals and ethnic cleansers).
The EU is an imperial institution bent not on promoting democracy, but on deterring it (in Noam Chomsky's phrase). Ms de Búrca's various suggestions are merely placebos. - Yours, etc,