A nation or a European province?

I WAS interested to hear Judge Frank Clarke refer to the Crotty Supreme Court judgment of 1987 on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland recently.

Raymond Crotty was my father. Judge Clarke was quite right to point out that the case was lost in some areas relating to economics.

As I recall, the Supreme Court found that because we were in the then EEC, which was an economic community, there was no case to be answered in relation to economic issues. Essentially the Supreme Court ruled that when we joined the EEC in 1973 we were part of a developing economic community and that most of the provisions of the Single European Act, which my father challenged, were part of that development and therefore did not need to be ratified by a referendum.