Spurious bid to link atrocities to Lisbon Treaty result

I DO not share Maurice O’Connell’s historically and politically flawed analysis (Letters, September 22) that the inability of British and Irish Lisbon ‘no-noes’ to understand the European project is due in part to the fact that they did not share, “even in a grandfather’s memories”, the types of atrocities experienced in Europe, including Auschwitz, the Katyn Woods, Lidice, or Oradour — the French town destroyed (by mistake?) by the Nazis, or jails in Franco’s Spain or the Colonels’ Greece.

This and other spurious attempts to link opposition to the Lisbon referendum result to such atrocities must be rejected.

I am a grandfather. I have visited Holocaust death camps and seen more recently some mass graves and atrocities in Bosnia, Croatia, East Timor and Zimbabwe. Opposition by peace activists to Lisbon and to militarisation of the EU is based on our knowledge of such events, and not on ignorance of them.