LABOUR CAMPAIGN:LABOUR LEADER Eamon Gilmore sharply criticised the No side in the Lisbon Treaty campaign. He said a poster had carried the slogan, "People died for your freedom - Don't throw it away'', superimposed on a copy of the the 1916 Proclamation.
"This is a totally false proposition. Ireland is not being asked to 'throw' its freedom away any more than Britain, or France, or Lithuania, or any other of the 27 member states.''
Mr Gilmore claimed there was an implicit inferiority complex by some of those on the No side who appeared to think that Ireland would be outwitted by the clever Europeans.
"We are told that they will force us to raise our corporation tax rates; they will trick us into losing our veto; and we will be seduced into a European army.
"Of course, the record shows that ever since January 1973 Ireland, under governments of various political hues, have been more than capable of holding their own at European level and protecting Irish interests when the need arose.''
Mr Gilmore, speaking at the launch of his party's poster campaign in Dublin, said all member states would retain their own laws, taxation and foreign policy decisions. Irish people would be able to decide for themselves, he added. The treaty reasserted the principle of conferral which provided that the EU should act "only within the limits of the competences conferred on it by member states''.
Those EU laws, which member states had to comply with, had been passed since Ireland joined the then EEC in 1973. "Nothing changes in this regard.''
Mr Gilmore said he was proud to be Irish, but he was also enthusiastic about the EU. "I acknowledge the huge benefits it has brought for the Irish people, and I want my country to remain at the heart of Europe.
"However, some of those calling for a No vote are people who appear to want to turn the clock back and are nostalgic for the sort of narrow, poverty-stricken, isolationist Ireland we had in the 1950s."
