ANOTHER LIFE: We voted, as usual, in the primary school at Killeen, a building pencilled into the landscape like a drawing by Paul Klee. It stands on its own on a stretch of reclaimed bog, with the distant triangle of Croagh Patrick on one side and a windy ocean on the other. We spotted a stray buzzard there the other evening, flying low towards the hills.
In such an ambience, with Atlantic raindrops sparkling on one's collar, it would have been easy to feel especially Green and bolshy and choose to protest about the "democratic deficit" in Nice.
But while we could certainly do with more smallness and democracy in the EU, I didn't feel free to insist on it yet. I'm too pathetically grateful for the EU Commission's lofty virtue in the protection of nature and landscape, and even for its lumbering bureaucracy. Without such pressures and controls, with conservation initiatives left to the approval of the Dáil, how much of our island would now be safe from rape? I have given up trying to trace how the original consensus about the value of wildlife and its habitats was arrived at within the European Community.
It is astonishing, really, that independent scientists should be listing and defining the species and habitats that need protection - all of it with such profound consequences for land use and planning in the member states. It's true that "imperative reasons of overriding public interest" can still be used to justify intrusion on protected areas - a motorway in Germany, a natural-gas pipe in Ireland, for example. But among the core values of the Commission, nature conservation still rules OK.
Even so, its machinery is often esoteric: one needs to know the right questions to ask, the right website to open Sesame.
Last June, for example, there was a meeting in The Hague: the final Atlantic Biogeographical Seminar of the European Topic Centre on Nature Protection and Biodiversity (ETC on BD). It took important decisions about the list of additional SACs (Special Areas of Conservation) proposed by Ireland's National Parks and Wildlife Service, approving most of them, adding others proposed by the five Irish conservation NGOs and encouraging the sorting out of still more, at this moment, between Dúchas and the NGOs.
Who were these expert people, acting for the Commission, who could rule on the spread and sufficiency of designated wet heaths and raised bogs, hardwater lakes, vegetated banks, limestone pavements, orchid-rich grasslands and the rest? The ETC on NPB - stick with me on this - is one of five "topic centres" in the European Environment Agency set up by the EU (others deal with waste, water, climate change and so on). Based in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the centre has a consortium drawn from science institutes in eight countries, a core team of nine people of several nationalities and an advisory group, open to all member countries. This group also includes the secretary of CONNECT, which is the European network of top ecological institutes in 11 countries, with its own set of co-operative research programmes. Nowhere in this web of nature-friendly science, stretching from Portugal to Sweden to Estonia is there an Irish name or institution.
This is, of course, quite separate from Ireland's reputation in the EU Commission as a "reluctant jurisdiction" when it comes to implementing the Birds and Habitats Directive. How much more Ireland needs to apologise for delays and omissions than several other member countries is open to argument. It has been a long and slow process, involving a great deal of chivvying.
A recent review of EU conservation law by Owen McIntyre of UCC reminds us that Ireland is only one of 11 defaulting member states (and that the commission's form for describing a Special Area of Conservation is 97 highly-technical pages long!).
The pressure on resources in preparing such forms has been among Ireland's excuses for delay (to which the Commission has replied, in effect: "That's your problem!"). And when the Commission took Ireland to the European Court last year, it became clear that queueing up behind the habitats for SACs was a backlog of sites to be declared as Special Protection Areas (SPAs) under the Wild Birds Directive.
Since this came into force 20 years ago, Ireland had designated 111 SPAs, including most of its wetlands of international importance. But the commission's accusatory "Reasoned Opinion" found many more yet to be adopted from the list of important bird areas compiled by BirdWatch Ireland - and Dúchas promptly responded by proposing 25 of them. A lot of these are coastal: estuaries and bays for wintering waterfowl; headlands, islands and cliffs for breeding seabirds and choughs.
The Commission worries that Dúchas seems to have "very limited involvement" in planning decisions within SPAs and it seems to expect a lot more vigilance over, for example, the granting of shellfish licence applications (a shore full of oyster and clam cages leaves little room for birds). No one, not even Dúchas itself, seems to be considering the long-term, cumulative loss of shoreline habitat.
What has all this got to do with me deciding to vote Yes last Saturday while quite seeing good reasons to vote No? I suppose it's about lovely old architecture, great wines, engaging intellectuals and novelists, top jobs for clever and stylish women, the whole seduction of a civilised Europe. To which I had to add the ETC of NPB and its assorted experts, who have been doing such a good job of turning us Green.