Ireland’s fight a familiar one

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: June 16, 2008

On the unlucky day of Tim Russert’s passing, the words of fellow Irishman and former mentor Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan stirred in the memory: “To be Irish is to know that, in the end, the world will break your heart.” As America mourned Moynihan’s former top lieutenant, the Irish, those recalcitrant rascals, took to a wee bit of table-turning, and so Europe wails.
To install a full-time president complete with palace and executive jet, add tonnage to its economic and diplomatic heft and standardize its widening bureaucracy, the European Union presented the Treaty of Lisbon, needing only the approval of all 27 member countries to make it the law of the eastern hemisphere. In 26 of those places, federal governments already have or were expected soon to assent. In Ireland, the decision was left to the people, and out came the fists.
Those hopelessly audacious Irish roundly rejected Lisbon, feeling its impress on that flickering concept known as national sovereignty. This has sent Europe into the sort of fright not seen since Americans came invading to the rescue more than 60 years ago. Bedeviled by those blasted Irish, the ravenous EU now is deprived of its desired delicacy, state liberties, and the accompanying expansion of centralized bureaucratic girth.
Stung but undeterred by Friday’s Irish uprising, known among mortified European bureaucrats and faux leaders as “the incident,” the EU is rallying to revive the rejected treaty, or some facsimile of it. Jim Murphy, minister of state for Europe, sniffed to BBC Radio: “Only those who previously wished to dance on the grave of this treaty, even before the Irish referendum, are declaring it dead.”
Of course, it is rather unclear who might wish to perform such jigs, since only Ireland gave her people voice on the question. Before Lisbon, signed in December, there was the European Constitution, about which voters in France and Holland were permitted to speak and responded with their own nays. That provoked what EU apologists and propagandists called a “period of reflection,” which produced almost precisely that. Lisbon streamlined but mirrored, as only it could, the constitution’s flaws.
The problem principally is one of details, which opponents stubbornly refused to ignore.
To wit:
The treaty provided for the appointments, rather than democratic elections, of an EU president and foreign minister. The weight of Irish votes on the EU Council, which would make the appointments, would have been cut by more than half while Germany’s weight would have doubled. Decisions about tax rates and many other issues affecting Ireland would have shifted from Dublin to Brussels. Lisbon would have set Ireland on a course for having her laws, including those proscribing abortion, usurped either immediately or later by the EU.
Ireland, in other words, would have ceded its republican autonomy and become a ward of the emerging European state. We hope the significance is not lost here. The divide in Europe over the EU, in fact, should ring familiar to Americans: it is one over the rights of individuals and states to govern themselves rather than being subjected to the material and moral tyranny of massive, centralized government. The question is about preservation of individual identity, which EU’s mere existence systematically subverts.
We urge Ireland to continue the good fight, and pray that spirit which prevails there has not yet vanished here, though clearly it has waned. Someday, we might well have our own treaty and national identity to consider.