‘Paddy the amiable pickpocket’ may show nasty streak in EU treaty vote
Reading accounts of that debate, and in particular the perspective offered by Green party Senator Deirdre de Burca, offers little clarity or comfort to the confused.
De Burca made a complete mess of her “defence” of the treaty and her case for a ‘yes’ vote by highlighting in detail the very points that will form the central planks of the ‘no’ campaign.
While she made positive noises about an EU charter of fundamental rights and the provision of a citizens’ petition to request the introduction of new legislation, she also admitted “there are aspects of the Lisbon Treaty that remain areas of real concern for me. The continuing democratic deficit of the European Union is only partially addressed by the treaty… some of the military and defence provisions of the Lisbon Treaty also cause me concern”.
She continued: “Given the present democratic deficit, I do not believe that the development of a much greater military capacity on the part of the EU is in the interests of its citizens … I also believe that the strength of the commitment in various provisions of the Lisbon Treaty to market liberalisation and undistorted competition has the potential to undermine the European social model and to threaten the continued existence of high-quality, universally accessible public services within the EU, including health and education”.
Not exactly a hard sell, was it? With friends like this, the Lisbon Treaty is in trouble and that, coupled with the growing negative perception of the EU in Ireland, is going to make the forthcoming campaign a potentially acrimonious one.
Those on the left and right of the political spectrum will find all sorts of reasons to make a case for a ‘no’ vote, but in truth the real challenge is to make the Irish electorate interested in what is going on in Brussels, and given that it is no longer about handouts, social and regional funds and CAP payments, that remains a formidable task.
What has changed significantly in the last decade regarding Ireland’s relationship with the EU is the extent to which political ideals have begun to enter the picture. In the early years they did not feature. The early Eurobarometers, taken twice a year to monitor feelings about the community in the member states, suggested that it was economics rather than politics that was foremost in the mind of the Irish.
The second Eurobarometer taken in autumn 1974, for example, found that 82% of Irish people polled considered the most important aspect of the community was economic. There was rarely any evidence in those days that enthusiasm for European integration could be taken at face value as an expression of a European identity, but rather that it was essentially pragmatic and related to how much money Ireland could get out of membership.
This is hardly surprising. Largely as a result of membership, by 1978 real per capita farming incomes were more than double their level in 1970.
In addition, between its initial payout from the Regional Fund in 1975 and 1981, Ireland received £159 million from the fund to aid the growth of infrastructure, and Irish receipts from the European Social Fund rose from £4.1m in 1973 to £53.5m in 1980.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the image of Ireland in Europe was one of being mostly concerned with the begging bowl, or as historian Joe Lee mischievously put it, “Paddy the amiable pickpocket”.
Who can forget Albert Reynolds’s glee at how much he’d bagged in structural funds in the early 1990s? Bernard Connolly, an official in the EU Commission and author of the Rotten Heart of Europe, commented cynically that the Irish electorate, or at least those who bothered to vote in 1992 had been “led blindfold into the Maastricht referendum trap beguiled by the ‘yes’ campaign’s siren song of six billion pounds”. With that kind of payout being loudly trumpeted, it is not surprising that a Eurobarometer in 1994 showed that 79% of the Irish surveyed responded positively to the question as to whether they viewed membership as a good thing, compared to 58% in the community as a whole.
Of course, Ireland benefited in many other ways from membership, particularly in terms of equality directives, social development and schemes to combat poverty and environmental damage.
But when it came to any sense of attachment to a ‘European ideal’ — however vaguely defined — we seemed immune and uninformed.
When he was Minister for European Affairs in 1995, Fine Gael’s Gay Mitchell expressed astonishment at the level of ignorance regarding basic knowledge of European Community structures, quoting a survey that revealed 50% of Irish people were unaware the European Parliament was directly elected by the peoples of Europe.
The turnout in the original 1972 referendum on whether to join the EEC was 72%; by the time of the vote on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, it was just 57.3%.
In 1994, Dermot Scott, an official in the EU Parliament, suggested that in Ireland, “for want of information, public opinion has not understood the EU and has therefore not genuinely taken the EU to its heart, having a somewhat semi-detached attitude, willing to go along, but having little knowledge or conviction about the goals of integration, little vision of what a European Union might become.
“The corollary is also true: that there seems to be little enough genuine opposition and that each dose of integration, however balefully received, is swallowed and ingested, though the patient may scowl at the next spoonful”.
BUT that was to change, and by 2001, turnout for the Nice referendum was a pathetic 35% which resulted in the rejection of that treaty and an instruction to vote again because the wrong answer had been given. The rerun of that referendum in October 2002 resulted in the passing of the treaty after many pro-Europe heavyweights were drafted in to hammer home the message that we were doomed if we rejected it again.
But there were many things that were clear from the Nice campaigns. There was a new and effective language about the EU in existence in Ireland based on the notion that we were throwing away our hard-won freedom to a new European superstate. Phrases like “democratic deficit”, “the marginalisation of smaller states”, “arrogant EU officials” and “the abandonment of Irish neutrality” were frequently employed. There was also the chance to give the government of the day a bloody nose.
All of these factors are relevant again, and perhaps most importantly, in recent years, those opposing EU referendums have demonstrated that they are effective in mobilising voters.
As usual, few will bother to read the text of the EU treaty, but the words of the architect of the rejected EU constitution, Giscard d’Estaing, may come back to haunt him and the Irish Government: “Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly … all the earlier proposals will be in a new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way”.
