Hoofdpunten in het debat voorafgaand aan referendum in Ierland (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - In an interview in French daily Le Monde on the weekend, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German Green MEP and veteran of the May évènements in Paris 1968 angrily warned Irish people against voting "No" in Thursday's (12 June) referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
The interviewer had clearly caught the grizzled but venerable soixante-huitard in a moment of great concern, having just read Friday's shock Irish Times poll that announced that in the space of a few weeks, the "no" side had leapt from 17 to 35 percent support.
"It should be recognised that referendums have consequences: If you say 'No,' you leave Europe," Mr Cohn-Bendit said.
"We've become egotistical societies," he added. "The Irish that say 'No' to Europe are like the Northern League that won the support of 40 percent of voters in northern Italy, because they didn't want to financially support the south of the country."
There is great fear in the hearts of treaty supporters on the continent that the Irish, who have benefited from EU largesse arguably more than any other member state, may spurn their benefactor once again as they did when they rejected the Nice Treaty seven years ago.
After the Nice "No," two amendments and a declaration assuring Irish neutrality were cobbled together and put to the Irish for a second vote in 2002, and to Europe's relief, they voted "yes."
But this time it is politically more difficult. The Lisbon Treaty is the answer to the EU constitutional treaty that was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.
Lisbon Treaty supporters are angry that many of the ‘No' side's arguments – on tax issues, sovereignty, abortion and neutrality – may result in the charter's rejection on Thursday.
Not all Greens feel the same way as the Mr Cohn-Bendit, however.
Mr Cohn-Bendit's Green Irish colleague and former MEP, Patricia McKenna, is the chairperson for the People's Movement, a left-wing eurosceptic group campaigning against the treaty. Speaking to EUobserver, she attacked Mr Cohn-Bendit's comments, arguing that xenophobia and other conservative concerns are not at the heart of the debate.
"That just displays such an ignorance about the topics that are in play in Ireland in arguments over the treaty," she said.
Her group, along with many – though not all – of the anti-treaty campaigners, say that the debate in Ireland is focused on the democratic deficit at the heart of Europe, the loss of sovereignty and the country's traditional neutrality.
"He [Cohn-Bendit] doesn't understand what the debates are, and for someone from outside Ireland to say that is unacceptable," she said. "These just aren't the reasons."
Ms McKenna and her anti-treaty grouping, the People's Movement, emphasise what they believe will be a loss of sovereignty via the extension of qualified majority voting and those periods when, under the treaty, Ireland like all countries, will have to forego a commissioner within the EU's executive.
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Elsewhere, the Irish Society for a Christian Civilisation has warned that the treaty would "ignore God and the Christian roots of Europe and will create a new European identity based on radical secularism and atheistic philosophies."
Furthermore, believes the group, the treaty will "facilitate abortion, euthanasia, and embryo experimentation" and impose homosexual marriage and gay adoption on the Roman Catholic country.
The Catholic Church hierarchy itself has dismissed the idea that the legal position of abortion in Ireland would be affected by the new treaty, however.
At the end of May, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, criticised the arguments of groups like the ISCC as introducing "extraneous factors" into the debate, as the Church has not taken an official position on the treaty.
"I do not believe that this treaty changes the current position [on abortion]," he said.
The one area where treaty opponents have managed to achieve some level of traction is the issue of tax harmonisation, thanks to Libertas, a pro-European but anti-treaty lobby group founded by millionaire Galway businessman Declan Ganley.
The group, spending, according to its own estimates, some €1.5 million on the campaign, argues the treaty will let in higher taxes "through the back door" and increase compliance costs for businesses.
Specifically, the group fears a "harmonisation" of corporate taxes across the EU, which they argue would undermine Ireland's low-cost attractiveness for business – a key element of the emergence of the so-called Celtic Tiger in the 1990s.
Instead of a new treaty, the group has demanded a "specific protocol on tax in order to protect Ireland's corporate tax advantage."
The Referendum Commission, an independent body, issued a statement countering the group's claims.
"So far as taxation is concerned, our considered view is that there isn't any change: that the present veto on taxation will continue," said the commission's chairperson, Justice Iarfhlaith O'Neill.
The trouble for the "Yes" side is that however broad it may be, cutting right across all sectors of society, the Irish Alliance for Europe and its allies are burdened with a difficult message to sell. It is hard to sum up why citizens should vote for the treaty in one pithy sentence.
The script as it was written also had the trade unions marching alongside their employers in support of the treaty, but as it has turned out, a number of trade union leaders have forgotten their lines.
The top of the trade union hierarchy has come out in support. Representing some 600,000 workers, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) gave an enormous boost to the "Yes" side when its executive council voted to encourage its members to support the treaty at the end of May.
For ICTU, the Treaty's establishment of a Charter of Fundamental Rights is a profound step forward for workers rights across Europe.
Peter McLoone, the general secretary of Impact, the largest public sector union in the country, quoted in the Irish Times, said that the Charter was "a prize" that European trade unionists across Europe had sought for "many, many years."
However, the ICTU vote was far from decisive, with 14 in favour, five opposed and eight abstentions. And although the trade union central executive narrowly supported the treaty, some of the countries' biggest unions are actively campaigning against it.
The Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union (TEEU), the country's largest craft union has urged a "no" vote; as has Unite, the joint British and Irish union representing largely private sector workers; and the Services, Industrial, Professional & Technical Union (SIPTU) – the country's largest union overall.
On Tuesday (10 June) union leaders from five unions, including the Teachers Union of Ireland and the Civil and Civil Public Services Union held a press conference calling on all trade unionists to vote "no."
"We...want to appeal to all workers to...stand up for their rights by rejecting Lisbon and send a clear message that Europe should be as much about social as economic well being," said Jimmy Kelly, Unite's Irish regional general secretary in a statement.
Historically pro-Europe, trade union leaders have swung sharply against the Lisbon Treaty in the wake of recent decisions by the European Court of Justice that they feel undermine rights to collective bargaining.
The farmers' lobby, the Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) on 4 June finally decided to urge its members to support the treaty. In a country that continues to have a strong agriculture sector, this should have been a major boost for the government and the "yes" side, but the decision may have come too late.
The IFA had until last week refused to recommend a "Yes" vote without a commitment from the government that it would veto an EU agreement to a World Trade Organisation deal based on proposals from European trade commissioner Peter Mandelson that it believes will harm Irish agriculture.
With the IFA having won such an agreement from prime minister Brian Cowen at the eleventh hour, it remains to be seen if the organisation's decision can swing enough rural votes behind the treaty.
The Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers' Association (ISCA) national executive also voted to support the treaty on 5 June by a majority of 59 percent to 42 percent. The previous Sunday (2 June), the second largest farmers' organisation in the country, the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA) also backed the "yes" side.
The governing centrist Fianna Fail and one of its coalition partners, the free-marketeers the Progressive Democrats both support the treaty, as do the opposition centre-right Fine Gael and the Labour Party.
The Greens, also coalition partners of Fianna Fail, however, are divided. At the government level, Green Party leader and environment minister John Gormley is out on the campaign trail backing the treaty alongside Mr Cowen. Nonetheless, the party, which had historically campaigned against every earlier EU treaty, failed to secure the two-thirds majority needed to make support for the treaty party policy. The vote meant that individual members were free to campaign on either side.
Opposition to war and militarism being a fundamental Green belief, the Greens that are campaigning against the treaty emphasise their concerns that it will put an end to traditional Irish neutrality and oblige member states to boost their military capabilities.
"The Lisbon Treaty furthers the military agenda of Europe, particularly with the inclusion of the European Defence Agency in the document," says Patricia McKenna, the most prominent Green politician campaigning against the treaty.
Sinn Fein, the sole party in the Irish parliament, the Dail, to oppose the treaty, mounts almost identical arguments, although putting slightly more emphasis on what it argues is the treaty's free-market bias and the threat to public services.
"The treaty is bad for public service and workers' rights," says Sinn Fein MEP Mary Lou McDonald, with articles that "open the door to greater levels of private participation in public services such as health and education."
Sinn Fein too claims to be very concern about a potential loss of the country's neutrality and European militarism.
"Under the treaty, common defence policies must be compatible with NATO, and member states are obliged to increase their military expenditures," warns Ms McDonald.
As in Finland, Sweden and Austria – Europe's other neutral nations, Ireland's unaligned status is popular. The government worked hard to neutralise the neutrality argument by drafting a protocol into the legislation that will transpose the treaty into Irish law, which would maintain Irish prohibition on joining a common European Union defence.
Ms McDonald, however, argues that neutrality means more than keeping a veto on the deployment of troops.
"Neutrality takes in a broader definition, and if there is the development of a military alliance, committing us to NATO, then we are clearly abandoning our neutrality," she says. "What is meant by 'mutual defence'? It's sufficiently legally vague that it leaves enormous wiggle room for the government to define it as it wants."
As with the "No" campaigns in France and the Netherlands in 2005, while all the mainstream parties, the business groupings and many of the trade unions and farmers' organisations are on the same side, small far-left, pacifist and anti-globalisation activist groups are playing a prominent role, in particular Ms McKenna's People's Movement.
The Campaign Against the EU Constitution brings all the left groups campaigning against the treaty under one roof. As well as the People's Movement and Sinn Fein, other coalition partners include the Irish Anti-War Movement, the Peace Neutrality Alliance (PANA), Eirigi (a left republican outfit), People Before Profit, the National Platform, the Socialist Party, the Workers Party, the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party. All emphasise democracy, privatisation and militarisation as their key concerns.
The arguments surrounding the treaty - from concerns about a loss of collective bargaining rights to a growth in European militarism on the "No" side, to their commitments to pan-Europeanism and making the 27-nation bloc work for all states in an expanded Union on the "Yes" side - much of the discussion on the treaty in Ireland is not just about its effects on Ireland, but on the whole of Europe.
Whether they vote "Yes" or "No", the Irish are having many of the same European arguments the people of any other member state would have were they to have a referendum.
Referendums do indeed have consequences, as Mr Cohn-Bendit says. Robust, democratic debate.