Anybody know a TD?

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday June 25, 2003 13:06 by seedot seedot at eircom dot net

If you do, make sure they go to the Dail on Friday. Tell them you're being lied to, ripped off and cheated - and you want them to get to the bottom of it. They should ask for the article 133 committee minutes and negotiating stances for the WTO round. We have a European scrutiny bill that, during our recent reconsideration of the Nice treaty, we were promised would make everything apparent - tell your TD friend to use it.

These committee minutes are the most up to date information on what Europe proposes will happen to our buses, our bins, our electricity - all that stuff that makes up nation building (ref. Ireland 1920's, Iraq now). As revealed by the article 133 information group, lobby firms and civil servants are formulating the European stances on all these issues thanks to the Nice treaty. As revealed by Peter Sutherland and Pascal Lamy, none of this will be subject to any democratic oversight in Europe. What is not revealed is the stance itself, since the government turned down 31 FOI requests from Attac Ireland covering the preparatory meetings of the Irish members of the 133 committee.

So legal agreements which will sign us up to GATS and TRIPS provisions impacting on bin charges and other utilities, public sector workers and services are being hidden from us on the grounds of commercial sensitivity. Because someone will make money ripping us off, the government can't tell us what they are doing on our behalf. And by the time they will be forced to admit that they lied when they said the Nice treaty didn't impact on trade all the bad news can be blamed on someone else - Europe, or 'The Market Regulation'.

The law passed last year supposedly introducing transparency into Europe for us Irish stopped anything becoming Irish law that the government refused questions on in the Dail. Got battered around and watered down in committee of course - them corporate lobbyists are just soooo good. But tell your TD friend to have a go - who knows they might get annoyed.