Vague doubts and fears from the No side should not sway voters, writes Garret FitzGerald.
I CAN - just about - remember the privations suffered by our farmers in the 1930s. I can clearly recall the appalling poverty in Dublin during the war when I was involved in the school's St Vincent de Paul Society and when infant mortality was running at over 10 per cent in Dublin.
I vividly remember the total economic stagnation of the 1950s - when, as a general lowering of trade barriers throughout western Europe led to rapid economic growth everywhere else, our politicians persisted for a period in hanging on to a suffocating protectionism and to a fatally negative ideological opposition to overseas foreign industrial investment that gave us almost a decade of economic stagnation.
But I remember also how all this began to change in 1956, and how in 1959 Seán Lemass, as a new taoiseach, suddenly opened up the prospect of Ireland belatedly joining in the invigorating project for European free trade.
In 1961, as an economic journalist, I paid my first visit to the European institutions in Brussels - but also reported privately to the Civil Service, at their request, on the reaction of commission officials that I met there to a possible Irish application for membership of the European Community . . . (Until then it had been universally assumed that we would seek only association with the community - the status vis-a-vis the EU that Turkey has had for the past 40 years.) And I clearly recall my elation when, three months later, sitting in the Dáil public gallery as Financial Times correspondent, I heard Lemass announce the decision to seek full membership of the EC.
But there followed General de Gaulle's 1962 veto on British, and also Irish, membership. When a decade later that veto was reversed by de Gaulle's immediate successor we negotiated our entry to the community, which was then endorsed in the remarkable referendum of May 1972, when 70 per cent of the electorate voted by 81 per cent to 19 per cent in favour of our membership.
Ireland had at last broken out from its 50-year-old self-imposed isolation from the outside world. Our people had emphatically rejected the first of Sinn Féin's seven successive referendum attempts to delude the electorate into believing that EU membership would threaten our neutrality by drawing us into a common defence alliance. What has actually happened is, of course, the exact opposite. Instead, we have since been joined in a strong EU neutral bloc by five states: Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Malta and Sweden. But that hasn't stopped Sinn Féin going on to play their broken record for the seventh time in the current referendum debate.
Sinn Féin is not the only serial objector to our European engagement. Each of our previous six referendums have also seen extreme religious elements trotting out the usual rubbish about the EU imposing abortion, euthanasia etc, upon an unsuspecting Irish public. This absurdity has now been rejected by the Irish Catholic bishops.
Another old untruth being trotted out once again has been that our veto on harmonisation of corporate taxes is in danger. It is of course true that a group of nine or more states could get together to harmonise the corporation tax rates of their states. But they can't force Ireland to raise our corporate tax rate to their much higher level - and that's what matters to us.
Those who have cried wolf about the same issues on the occasion of seven successive referendums, and have been shown to have been wrong on every occasion, have lost all credibility. I have been criticised for warning about the consequences of a No vote. Maybe I could have expressed my concerns on this score more elegantly. But I have more experience than most people of just how much has been won for Ireland through the goodwill we have built up by acting as positive members of the community, now the union. And I think it is important that voters should understand just how damaging it would be to lose that goodwill, without any compelling reason to do so.
Without our having any absolutely compelling reason to do so it would clearly be very foolish to infuriate gratuitously the politicians of 26 states, who have invested six years of effort into securing agreement on this text. All of these politicians know that during this long negotiation we won every single safeguard that we needed, and if we now defeat and destroy a project upon which they have expended such immense effort, and which they have seen our negotiators mould so skilfully and effectively to Irish purposes, none of these political leaders is likely to feel much goodwill towards us in future.
One of the problems about this referendum debate is that, like myself 35 years ago, none of the treaty opponents understands how in practice the European system works. It is not, as treaty opponents seem to imagine, a question of "dog eats dog", of constant disputes and mutual national hostility.
On the contrary, there is quite a lot of quiet co-operation, one might even say collegiality, in the council, as ministers, recognising each other's national concerns, trying to help each other to find solutions to their respective problems - as president Mitterrand displayed when he supported the Irish case for a 13 per cent increase in the milk quota.
In this decision-making process goodwill of that kind is hugely important - and Ireland, through its positive contributions to the working of the EU, including six highly successful presidencies and the reinforcement of these positive contributions by the "networking" skills of Ministers and diplomats, has won more goodwill for its interests than perhaps any other member state.
Now, one thing all the opponents of the treaty, whether from the extreme right or extreme left, share is ignorance of the practical working of the union institutions. I suspect that they may be genuinely unaware of just how damaging to our national interest would be the loss of 35 years of accumulated goodwill that would follow an Irish defeat of the Lisbon Treaty.
For these reasons, unless a voter is absolutely convinced that some hugely important Irish interest would be fatally damaged by ratifying this treaty, I believe he or she should come out on Thursday to vote for it. Vague doubts, instilled by fears skilfully generated by anti-treaty spokesmen, should not persuade anyone to risk damaging Ireland's vital interest in a successful outcome to this referendum.