It's a rough rule of thumb, but when the two verdants of Irish life, the Greens and Sinn Fein, agree on something, I'm agin it - though it's not always easy to work out which side Sinn Fein is actually on. In the US recently, a leading Sinn Feiner visited a prisoner on death row as a gesture of solidarity, because, it seems, Sinn Fein is against the death penalty. I have no words to describe my reaction to this. It is rather like hearing of the Dalai Lama approving of the execution of a few of his monks by the Red Army or of Iran investing in a bacon factory in Tel Aviv. Some names rise to my lips from the nearly 1,800 people the IRA have killed - most recently Eamon Collins, Paul Downey, Charles Bennett and Paul Daly, all of them post-ceasefire murders - and I fall silent.
Military alliances
And now with throbbing temples we hear that Sinn Fein is against the Nice Treaty, because it is in favour of a demilitarised Europe. (You wouldn't have an aspirin there, now, would you?) The other Greens, the sandalled ones, are also against Nice, because they are against large military alliances, and like the Shinners, feel that Nice compromises our neutrality. Well, if it did, I'd be all in favour of it: to have been neutral in the struggle between communism and democracy was no virtue, and to remain "neutral" now simply has no meaning, but is merely a much-touted but empty piety, like octogenarians denouncing vice.
What worries me about Nice and the entire EU project is the vast bureaucracy which is forming at its heart, one which is certain to get bigger and bigger as all of Europe and Turkey become involved. Of course, the idea of being able to move from Warsaw to Dingle without a passport or customs officer rummaging through your knickers is enchanting - provided not too many people want to do it. When the population of the Carpathians decide that they yearn to live in Kilbarrack, the notion of free movement of populations might seem less attractive.
But even if most people choose to stay in their country of origin, there will some emigrants who will be a curse, and who should be loathed and reviled across the broad stretch of the EU, from the Straits of Hercules to the Arctic Circle, from Bantry Bay to the Baltic. They are the Eurocrats, the vastly overpaid nomenklatura who are drawn to the overgorged centre of the EU in Brussels. These are the busybody, interfering fools who decide that cheese may not be made from unpasteurised milk, that pheasants may not be hung in shop windows, that cooked meat products may not be displayed alongside non-meat products.
Vassal states
A free trade area is one thing - we see one developing across the continent of America. The European Union is something else entirely. I read Liz O'Donnell's impassioned and eloquent defence of Nice last week with interest; if it were merely what she says it is, and what she clearly thinks it is, an enlargement of the union to encompass former communist vassal states such as Poland, Bulgaria and so on, I would raise no objection. My concern is the creation of a central bureaucracy which is either outside the control of any state or, perhaps even worse, which could be subject to the control of one or two powerful states within the Union, most obviously France and Germany, both of which have historic pan-European missions.
Any discussion about this historic truth is still-born in Ireland because of our desire to be better and more enthusiastic Europeans than the British. Europhilia is almost an Irish badge of identity, and to wonder whether or not the historical forces which once drove Germany and France are quite as extinct as Euro-enthusiasts maintain is an unmentionable heresy. Yet we know from our own history that certain traditions remain invisibly vibrant and powerful within our political culture, though clothed in the raiments of modernity, as the popularity of Sinn Fein among young people in the Republic testifies.
So merely the heartfelt and genuine assurance from the governments of Paris and Berlin that they are not set on turning the European Union into a new Empire is not enough. I believe them. But those elected to power tomorrow might represent traditions which are not evident in government today; and if some future politicians, who are driven by more atavistic urges than today's, have control of these mighty pan-European institutions with power over our laws and our resources, might they not manipulate them for their own ends, with us powerless to halt them? A benign institution can with mere cellular manipulation become a highly malignant one, as any oncologist can tell you.
Non-nation state
But even without the reemergence of ancient historical forces in France and Germany, and even allowing their their agendas remain open and democratic, there remains this other mighty non-nation imperial state in Brussels. It is growing almost unchecked because those who might limit that growth, the elected politicians of Europe, are themselves devotees of the European Project: who seeks to be an MEP who wishes to close down the EU?
And what power will reside there when its governance reaches from Anatolia to the Skaggerack, from Malta to Malin Head? It worries me. Yet there remains one powerful reason for voting for Nice: the opposition to it from the Shinners and Sandals. If Bono's against it too, then my mind's made up: I'm voting yes.