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AND do you care about abortion and gay-marriage rights? Or about
losing your chance to decide on laws affecting your life and turning
over that decision-making power to your congressmen? Do you care how
the Irish voted on the European Union’s Treaty of Lisbon?
I’m writing on this subject because many of my
friends and readers and I have mutual Irish friends everywhere in
the world.
Here in the Philippines, I’m sure my friends
among the Columban fathers who are of Irish descent (even if some of
them come from Australia)—and friends of my youth who became close
to the late Fr. Michael Nolan (he received me into the Catholic
Church and officiated at my wedding), and Fr. Mulroy, Fr. Sheehy,
Fr. MacCaslin, Fr. Dunn and Fr. Delaney, all of these, kind and
Christ-like Irishmen who served as Student Catholic Action
chaplains—do care what happens to the EU and how the Irish people
decide to relate to it.
But the immediate impulse that drove me to write
this column was the thought that my friends, Eugene O’Rafferty,
who died only three months ago, and his wife, now widow, Laurie
O’Neil O’Raffferty, would have cast “no” votes if they had
been in their native Dalkey, County Dublin, on Thursday, June 12,
for the referendum on the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon.
The majority of Ireland ’s citizens voted to
reject the EU’s constitutional Treaty of Lisbon on Thursday. They
voted “no” because:
They care what kind of union of 27 countries the
EU should be.
They care about the threat of losing their power
to decide on constitutional issues affecting their lives and turning
over that decision-making power to the members of their National
Parliament and, even worse, to the members of the EU Parliament.
They care that some EU law might require Ireland
to raise its low corporate tax of 12.5 percent (even if the Lisbon
Treaty vaguely says each EU member country could veto laws on
taxation matters).
They care that abortion and gay-marriage
rights—not allowed in the Eire constitution— might be imposed on
them by the European Parliament or some EU Commission.
They care that the EU, following World Trade
Organization pressure, might cut beef import tariffs and kill
Ireland ’s cattle and beef industry.
They care that giving the EU a semi-permanent
presidency, instead of a rotating one among the 27 members,
streamlining the EU executive commissions and reconfiguring the
voting rights of member countries based on population size would
diminish the 3 million Irish people’s ability to object to what
the 490 million people of the EU’s bigger countries might want.
That is why the Irish majority (53.4 percent
“no” against 46.6 percent “yes”) rejected the Treaty of
Lisbon.
The referendum attracted a huge turnout. The
7-percent win of the “no” votes, by Irish election standards, is
substantial.
Because of Ireland ’s “no” vote the
European Union is once again facing the threat of an institutional,
or existential, constitutional crisis.
The Lisbon Treaty was thought of by EU
politicians and statesmen to make decision-making easier in the
EU’s legislative and governance procedures.
Three years ago, the proposed EU
Constitution—mainly written by the French former president Valery
Giscard D’Estaing—also suffered nonpassage. French and Dutch
voters rejected it in their referendums. Then Giscard continued to
campaign for his EU constitution in other countries. EU rules now require
constitutional matters to be approved by the electorate of every
member country.
A right-of-center proponent of a tighter
European union, Giscard might have contributed to the Irish
rejection of the Lisbon Treaty. In a June 2007 interview with Le
Monde, he said that under the provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon
“the public would be led to adopt, without knowing it, the
proposals we dare not present to them [the people] directly.” Of
course the rejectionists used this quote to claim that an
anti-democratic conspiracy is afoot in the EU leadership.
Giscard was the president (chairman) of the
Convention of the Future of Europe in 2002 to 2003. His draft of the
EU constitution was anathema to many Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican
bishops and serious Christians who would have wanted the document to
acknowledge Europe’s Christian heritage. For there would be no
Europe if it were not for such people as St. Benedictine, the
Catholic universities and their philosophers, historians, scholars,
and the writings of Christian intellectuals and the work of
monk-librarians.
The EU constitution that Giscard championed paid
no tribute to Christianity. The authors were determined to create a
purely secularist European society so different from the EU
envisioned by the original EU founding fathers: France’s Jean
Monnet and Robert Schuman and Belgium’s Paul Henri Spaak.
It’s all a question of solidarity and
subsidiarity. Solidarity is to care for and effectively support the
whole. Subsidiarity is to let the smaller units function freely and
effectively for their own and the common good. It has to be like
that in families, offices, factories, and governments of countries
and of unions of states like the EU.
rqb@manilatimes.net
rq_bas@yahoo.com
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