Greens get their answer on treaty

THE Green Party is asking members for feedback on the Lisbon Treaty.

As a swing voter, I have been willing to vote Green, subject to the party programme. Since the despicable sell-out over the M3 and Tara, however, I am afraid they have zero credibility with me and anybody else who thinks the way I do.

For the future, my best advice is for them all to resign and join the PDs and for the Green party to be reconvened with 100% different personnel.

As to the Lisbon referendum, it would be a mistake to think we voters “did not understand” the treaty.

Naturally, the legalese of the document itself was completely impenetrable; the ‘information’ leaflet we got through the door was staggeringly obscure.

No, we didn’t understand the legalese, but we could recognise a con when we saw one. No other country was to be allowed to vote on it. What does that tell us?

We also knew it was virtually identical to the European constitution that was being rejected by country after country until our masters hurriedly called off the scheduled elections.

Political parties have no role in a referendum. The power goes directly to the individual citizen. The parties had no right to use their organisations to lobby either for or against.

Referenda are on a completely different playing-field from regular party politics. They forgot that, to their cost. What we want is a partnership of independent nations. This has worked again and again in history. Enlightened self-interest produces plenty of checks and balances.

We do not want to find ourselves manoeuvred into a faceless empire controlled by unelected Brussels bureaucrats and a majority of Europeans now know this is where they are trying to take us — in the small print — while trying to sell it as “the only way to prosperity”.

It is not true that Irish politicians were lazy or preoccupied over the referendum. They wanted us to vote yes in our sleep. They knew this treaty was designed to impose a centralised empire on Europe by stealth.

The more the voters heard about the reality, the more they decided to vote no. And no amount of tinkering at the edges will any longer obscure the fact that the treaty would have granted the power to make further changes at will without any further democratic ‘interference’ from voters.

Legally, the treaty must now be abandoned. We, the sovereign nation of Ireland, have played our honourable part and voted in a democratic way. The EU must now accept that. And no, we do not want to lose our own constitution — without which there would have been no vote here at all.

Micheál Ó Fearghail

Loreto

Sallybrook House

Glanmire

Co Cork