Madam, - Ben Dunne is as entitled as anyone else to run for public office to further his objections to a second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (The Irish Times, June 17th).
At the same time, however, Mr Dunne thinks President Sarkozy has "a hell of a cheek" to say anything about Ireland's vote.Whether he is right or wrong about the treaty, President Sarkozy is a democratically elected head of a state whose government was one of 27 that negotiated the Lisbon Treaty. He is also current president of the EU.
It seems contradictory for Mr Dunne to proclaim his own right to express opinions on this subject while castigating others for doing so. - Yours, etc,
A. LEAVY, Sutton, Dublin 13.
Madam, - If the president of France strolls down O'Connell Street during his visit to Dublin, he should note Parnell's demand that no man has the right to put a boundary to the march of a nation.
Further down the street he should learn of William Smith O'Brien. Following a visit to the new revolutionary government in Paris in April 1848, O'Brien asserted in Westminster that he had not sought military aid from France, "for to do so would be to put one form of domination in place of another".
This independent and neutral national defence policy developed by the Young Irelanders was to prove so successful for us over the following century. By it we regained our independence, and, by incorporation into Art 15.6 of our Constitution, it preserved us during the second World War.
Just as the Soviets of old incorporated less powerful East European nations into the Warsaw Pact to bolster Russian national defence, France is now one of those nations seeking to extend its national defence arrangements beyond its own boundaries by dominating nations on the periphery of Europe.
In my view, the forfeiture of national sovereignty required by the Lisbon Treaty would eventually drive Ireland back into the subservience that we escaped from almost a century ago, and which Eastern Europe threw off more recently. - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL HEERY, North King Street, Dublin 7.