Coalition spends €600,000 on Nice booklet
The Taoiseach insisted yesterday the booklet did not contravene the McKenna judgment, which bans the State from supporting one side of a referendum campaign. The booklet does not advocate a Yes vote in the referendum, he said.
“It is totally within the rules and totally within the laws,” Mr Ahern said.
But the Green Party accused the Government of undermining the McKenna judgment with the publication. The booklet will be posted out to every household in the country. The full cost of design, publication and distribution of the booklet to 1.4 million homes is 600,000 euro.
But the independent body responsible for informing the public, the Referendum Commission, is also spending 3.5 million euro on its information campaign.
The Government booklet is designed to inform the public, Mr Ahern insisted. He said one of the mistakes of the last referendum was that voters did not understand the Nice Treaty and did not have enough information.
Green Party leader Trevor Sargent said the leaflet was basically a slick editing and production job designed to portray the Nice Treaty in the best possible light.
“It is a biased piece of production. In other words, what the booklet doesn’t say is just as important as what it does say. For example, the Government omits to tell the public how functions of the Western European Union nuclear armed alliance are to be subsumed into the EU after Nice,” he said.
Mr Ahern said he did not know of another government that cannot use State resources to fight for a Yes vote, but that was the law and the Government would abide by it.
Warning against a No vote in the forthcoming referendum, Mr Ahern said a second rejection of the Nice Treaty would let many people down, particularly those in the applicant States.
If the treaty is rejected, Mr Ahern said Ireland would be seen to have blocked and impeded enlargement.
“To get this passed is in my view a huge part of the national interest,” he said.
Membership of the EU is vital to many aspects of everyday life in this country and Europe must not be remote from its people, Mr Ahern said.
“We are looking at ways in which we can better communicate Europe to our people.
“We must remove the confusions and we must deal better with the misapprehensions,” he said.
The 14-page booklet details the changes to be made to the European Union if the Nice Treaty is passed here next month. It also outlines the Seville Declaration, made by the EU member states in June, which clarifies Ireland’s position of military neutrality.
The Referendum Commission’s information is supposed to help voters to understand the issues involved in the referendum.
Following criticism that the Referendum Commission’s information campaign confused voters before the first Nice vote, the Government changed its terms of reference to prevent it from going into the Yes and No arguments in the referendum.
