Yes vote is a vote for our future

Whence comes the real danger to our freedom, religion and cause? From ourselves, our unwillingness to see the bigger picture, to hear John Donne’s threatening bell tolling for us — and refusal to grasp the nettle.

Our first lesson very slowly learnt, has been that our species’ mismanagement of this planet has made an environmental doomsday scenario possible, if not probable. Some of us have learnt from the Iraq adventure that old-style big power and unilateralism has endangered us all and not just those sad images from ‘other’ countries we see on television.

What kind of world, what way of life, are we bequeathing to our children and grandchildren? Are we helpless in the face of an historical process hopelessly out of control? Two thousand years ago, because they could not defend their common heritage, the myriad squabbling city states of ancient Greece were overrun by a Roman empire which had its merits but was totalitarian.

The empire’s own corruption destroyed it from within.

The historical origins of the EU seem as irrelevant to anybody under 50 as Charlemagne or Brian Boru. Nevertheless, every member state except Britain, Sweden and Ireland has emerged from foreign occupation or domestic dictatorship within living memory.

The European project is far from perfect. It requires constant vigilance — and reform. Because it is about real power, it always has greedy eyes upon it.

But with all its boring, bureaucratic, Byzantine faults, it is about the possibility of we, the people and individual citizens of the countries of Europe, controlling our own futures — at the trans-national level where the actual decisions are made and within political institutions where our voices can be heard and can be effective.

It is about a community of values — and aspirations towards the kind of life towards which, in each of our countries, our ancestors have worked and too often given their lives. The life we would wish for those people who are our very own.

The politics of the next decade will be the politics of what Europe can do to make this the planet on which we might want our grandchildren to live. I want my country, Ireland, not just to be a part of that process but at its very heart. That is why I shall vote yes.

Maurice O’Connell

19 Forge Park

Oakpark

Tralee

Co Kerry