Debate continues on benefit of EEC membership

MARCH 8TH, 1967: The question of Ireland’s military neutrality was a side issue during the 1960s as debate continued about the…

MARCH 8TH, 1967: The question of Ireland's military neutrality was a side issue during the 1960s as debate continued about the benefits of membership of the EEC, as the EU was then. Whenever the issue was raised it tended to be fudged as this editorial summing up the state of play in 1967 indicates.

THE TAOISEACH assured the Dáil yesterday that the Treaty of Rome does not require new members to join a military alliance. In all recent speculation about the chances of our getting into the European Economic Community, the subject of NATO has not been raised.

A lot of water has flowed under many a bridge since the days when Mr Seán MacBride, as Minister for External Affairs, was able to state categorically that Ireland could not become a member of NATO because of legal objections, Ireland being a country cut in two. But that was when we were being invited to join NATO without any corresponding advantage and with immediate liabilities. When the question of joining EEC arose and Mr Lemass went to Brussels to feel out the ground, Mr Ó Moráin, Minister for Lands, in the course of a post-prandial dissertation let drop that going into NATO presented no difficulties. After the rejection of Britain’s application, the matter lapsed until recently. It seemed that all the portents were, and are, against any change in General de Gaulle’s intransigence on this question; but Mr Wilson is still busy, and Mr Colley, on his return from Brussels recently, spoke with moderate hopefulness about our own chance.

It is at this stage that the matter of joining NATO has again been raised.

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When M Albert Coppé, acting president of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community, one of the three Common Market commissions, was speaking in Dublin on Monday night he said that “the European Six are not neutral.”

M Coppé declined to answer a direct question put to him by one of his listeners, and he did say something about Ireland’s role as a neutral nation which would have to be given consideration.

But Mr T F O’Higgins, TD, the runner-up in last summer’s Presidency election, in the course of a speech spoke of this being a not insuperable objection; and Mr Colley, Minister for Industry and Commerce, who was present, so comported himself as to appear to agree with this. And in his own speech, allowing for the passion for vague generalities which is written in to all such pronouncements, there was no suggestion of any reservations underlying Ireland’s wish to join the community.

Apart from those to whom our neutrality is a matter of principle, there may well be an indifferent majority on the point who will nevertheless inquire: how much is this going to cost?

Two years ago, this newspaper published an article by a correspondent of the New York Times, who stated then: “In the East-West power conflict, the West spends almost twice as much as the East on military protection, but the East gains politically . . . NATO countries disburse on armaments nearly double the amount of that spent by signatories to the Warsaw Pact.”

It will be said that we can afford what the 15 members of NATO can afford, and it is petty to raise the question; but in all this business of EEC, experience has taught us that it produces pontification at stated intervals, none of which has been tested and all of which is highly theoretical.

We will go into EEC, if and when we do go, with rather less certainty of the consequences or what we shall find there than the astronauts who are first to land on the moon. And with the same problem of a return journey if we do not like it when we get there. But the NATO question is one upon which it should be possible to be fully briefed. Or does Mr Colley share the view of his colleague, Mr Aiken, that the less said about these matters the better?


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