Taoiseach Bertie Ahern turns Ireland into Germany's pliant instrument for browbeating the Poles

international | eu | opinion/analysis Monday January 26, 2004 21:00 by Anthony Coughlan

Statement from the National Platform

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At Davos last weekend Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said: "If people just
stick totally with Nice and don't move at all, you can't do that because
it's not going to be satisfactory to Germany. There's a fair amount of
sympathy for the German position because they are a large country, they are
a big part of the paymaster. We need to look very helpfully at the German
position. I have to try and get movement from those who need to move and at
the same time not try to put it in a way that forces them beyond a position
they can explain to their own people and their own parliaments."

- Irish Times, Monday 26 January 2004)


It is shameful that Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern should be siding with the
EU's largest country, Germany, as his remarks at Davos indicate, and
implicitly threatening Poland if it does not agree to adopt the
population-based voting system for EU law-making that is desired by Germany
and France.

It is brazen as well as shameful coming from the Taoiseach who pushed
through the Nice Treaty in the repeat referendum he held in Ireland in 2002
by saying that the voting system agreed at Nice was essential for EU
enlargement,and was the best system for law-making in an enlarged EU.

If the EU were a single State for a European "super-nation", in which
Ireland, Poland and other member states were provinces, the
population-based voting system demanded by Germany and France for an EU
Constitution would make sense, for Germany's 85 million people would
entitle it to greatest influence.

Inside a federated EU State Germany could look forward to being joined in
due time by Turkey, with its 100 million population, whose admission to the
EU Germany champions. In the meantime Germany and France between them have
nearly 40% of the population of an enlarged EU. That would enable them to
block whatever EU laws they do not want and, with some allies, to push
through whatever EU measures they do want.

If the EU is not to be one State, but a partnership or alliance of
constitutionally equal States, then it is proper that Poland and Spain
should have similar voting weight to Germany - indeed that smaller
countries than either of them should have that too.

The population-based system for making EU laws that is proposed in the
draft EU Constitution Taoiseach Ahern is striving to bring into being -
i.e. a 60% population headcount - would turn the existing river of EU
legislation into a flood. It would greatly increase the volume of
legislation coming from Brussels, which is why the EU Commission and
Parliament desire it, for their power derives from their role in EU
law-making.

National parliaments would become little more than county councils under
the proposed EU Constitution. Citizens would have no control over what was
happening politically. Their law-makers and rulers would no longer be
accountable to them. Their national Constitutions would be wholly
subordinate to the EU Constitution. The EU would become an international
actor in its own right for the first time, separate from and superior to
its Member States, for it would acquire the legal personality and
independent corporate existence that it does not have at present.

What a dishonourable political condition Messrs Ahern, Cowen and their
fellow enthusiasts for ever-further EU integration have brought their
country to, considering its historical traditions of national independence
and democracy:-

That the Irish Government should be reduced to a pliant instrument of the
former imperial powers of Europe as they seek to foist a Constitution for
an EU State on the peoples and national democracies of our continent - so
that Irish Ministers may personally be able to enjoy the perquisites of a
minor role in running such an EU Superstate themselves, while presiding
over an emasculated parliament and an effectively disenfranchised
citizenry.


Anthony Coughlan

Secretary