For cynicism, misrepresentation and nonsense, the Lisbon Treaty campaign is unprecedented, writes Vincent Browne.
THE LISBON Treaty campaign is so suffused with cynicism, misrepresentation, exaggeration, scare-mongering and sheer nonsense that it surpasses even the ordinary electorate campaigns for chicanery and deceit. On both sides.
The most blatant instance of cynicism is the manner in which the campaign has been used to promote three of the party leaders, Enda Kenny, Eamon Gilmore and Ciarán Cannon (the latter is the teenager grinning from posters, the new leader of the late Progressive Democrats) and hordes of others who intend standing either in next year's Euro elections or in the local elections. This opportunity for self-advertisement comes about from a loophole in the litter laws.
There is then the brazen cynicism in presenting a constitutional change to the electorate (for changes to EU treaties are indeed changes to our Constitution) in terms which they could not possibly understand and therefore could not possible make an independent judgment upon.
This was entirely avoidable both by the EU and by the Irish Government but both, it seems, had/have a vested interest in making the proposed changes utterly unintelligible. The claims by Enda Kenny and others to have read the Lisbon Treaty from cover to cover are as plausible as a claim by the same characters to have read the telephone directory from cover to cover. It can't be done. Nobody has ever done it. Ever. Anywhere. (Yes, a few have read it in conjunction with the other treaties, but that is not what Enda Kenny et al have claimed.)
There is the further cynicism on the part of the European Council in redrafting the EU constitution, which was rejected by the French and Dutch voters in 2004, while retaining the essential elements of the constitution, in a way to justify defeating the will of the electorates on essentially the same proposition. And they have the nerve to talk how this treaty furthers democracy!
Much of the claims made by both sides are also entirely bogus.
The stuff about abortion, about children under three being put in detention because of this treaty; that somehow the emergence of the Union as one, rather than two, legal personalities makes a whit of difference; that the citizenship thing is other than a piece of cosmetics - all this is just baloney.
But what is also baloney is the suggestion that we would be "abandoning" Europe or "putting ourselves on the periphery" by voting No.
We would be no more abandoning Europe or putting ourselves on the periphery than the Dutch and the French did four years ago when they voted against the proposed new constitution. Also baloney is the claim that a rejection of the Lisbon Treaty would cause "chaos" in the EU. It would do nothing of the sort. The EU has worked just fine for the last four years with 25 member states, and latterly 27 member states, with the institutions and voting mechanisms that have operated for some time. If the Lisbon Treaty is rejected the EU will continue to operate just fine. Nobody will notice the difference. And as for the infamous Plan B, there may be no Plan B because the existing Plan A is working fine.
It is also my view that the Charter of Fundamental Rights will make no difference at all either, although I am a little discomforted in this opinion by the view of a genuine expert on such matters, Gerard Hogan SC, co-author of the definitive work on the Irish Constitution (and therefore on the impact of the EU on the Irish Constitution), who believes that the Charter of Fundamental Rights will introduce an area of uncertainty into constitutional interpretation on fundamental rights.
But the charter is largely irrelevant to, well, almost everything. It applies only in relation to the implementation of EU law and has no relevance at all in relation to most of the rights stipulated in the charter. For instance, what has the right to marry to do with the EU, or the rights of the child, or the right to criminal due process, or the right to healthcare? They are within the exclusive competence of the member states, so what is the meaning of this? The claim that the charter protects workers' rights in ways that "trump" the EU Court of Justice's decision in the controversial Laval case is also questionable.
So the claims made by both sides on the charter - on the one side that it opens the way to EU competences in a new vast arena to do with fundamental rights, and on the other side that it represents a further copper-fastening of those rights - is more baloney.
There are a few areas that matter and many of them arise not specifically from the Lisbon Treaty but generally and they have to do, in my view, mainly with democracy (yes, I appreciate there are some improvements here in relation to the European Parliament and the bit-role accorded national parliaments) and with defence (yes, I know, we have an opt-out in relation to participating in "defence" escapades). But these issues intrude hardly at all into the debate.