Giscard’s chance to write the final charter

RÓNÁN MULLEN, in analysing Valéry Giscard D’Estaing’s draft European constitution (Irish Examiner, June 11), forgot one important point: the French, who gave us Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Monsieur Guillotine’s revolutionary invention (the bread slicer), are quite capable of anything.

But that's hardly reason enough to put the whole question of women's reproductive rights, medical ethics and secular social programmes back in the sole care of the Fianna Fáil stalwarts who are currently sitting in judgment on the benches of the Irish courts.

Go back to the sources, Rónán. Go back to the New Testament where it appears that the process of secularisation, demythologising and debunking of superstition is already underway.

And the veil of the temple was rent in two, from top to bottom signalling not just the end of the law as ultimate arbiter, but the breaking down of barriers between the religious and the profane. For the common man is anything but common.

If the new European constitution is a truly enlightened document, then it will recognise that our material and spiritual welfare is the 'stuff that dreams are made of'.

The stuff of life and legend, as well as life and limb. May those who draft it have the humility to recognise that we are in need of personal and spiritual redemption as well as material and social liberation.

Then it could well be a document our children will be proud to inherit.

Richard Dowling,

Coote Street,

Mountrath,

Co Laois