EU ‘contract’ is a pig in a poke and the ministerial salesmen are not to be trusted

WOULD you sign a contract without reading it especially if you didn’t trust the salesman?

If that contract was so important that it could change your life and it included a lot of small print, would you be tempted to take it to your solicitor first and get some professional advice.

Later this year you will be urged to vote ‘yes’ to the Lisbon Treaty by salesmen you have good reason not to trust.

The treaty itself is long and difficult to comprehend, but as an example of the democratic transparency that is central to the treaty itself, the document is freely available so you cannot claim afterwards you were not informed.

It is certainly very cleverly written. It is long on glorious aspirations and at any point that it gets specific on a given conflict of opinion, it somehow manages to con you into believing it can simultaneously support all sides.

It does not say we are going to do this or that, but throughout you are being asked to give the European Parliament the power and it will decide later what it wants to do.

In reality, what this means is that at some point in the future, should the EU declare war on anybody, they might decide to conscript your children into a European army and you can’t say ‘no’ because you supported it (and you knew what you were doing because the document was available).

I’m not saying they’d do that, though I wouldn’t find it unbelievable if they did.

What I am saying is that they have presented a contract to me that I can’t understand because it’s so open to interpretation afterwards and I am certainly not going to believe any of the current crop of ministers trotting out their various guarantees. I’ve read the treaty and I still don’t know if voting ‘yes’ would be a good thing or a calamity so I’m not taking any chances — ‘no’ to the Lisbon Treaty.

John Mallon

Shamrock Grove

Mayfield

Cork