Madam, - May I respond to criticisms of my article of November 1st on the EU Constitution by Minister Noel Treacy, former minister Justin Keating and Eugene Regan of the Institute of European Affairs?
Mr Treacy seeks to play down the fact that the "Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe" has the legal effect of turning the EU into a European federal state in which existing member-states such as Ireland are reduced to the constitutional status of provinces. He makes a fundamental mistake when he writes that "Union law" has always had primacy over the law of member-states, when there is no such thing as "Union law". It is "Community", not Union, law that has primacy in the narrow, mainly economic area of the supranational European Community, which still exists as a legal entity.
Mr Eugene Regan also confuses EC and EU law, or carelessly confuses the European Union with the European Community in a manner surprising for a university lecturer in law, just as Mr Treacy does. In all other governmental areas - foreign and security policy, justice and home affairs, social service policy, taxation - the EU member-states have remained sovereign up to now and co-operate with one another independently as equals. The Union has had no legal existence as such, separate from its individual member-states, and the title "European Union" has been descriptively applied to it. This is a vital point, if people are to understand what the EU Constitution proposes.
The European Constitution will change this by asking us to give the EU a legal personality. For the first time it establishes, in legal and political terms, a new European Union founded like any state upon its own constitution, which makes all areas of government policy, not just some, subject in principle to that constitution. There is nothing in the proposed EU Constitution that reserves any particular area of government or public policy permanently to the member-states.
Mr Treacy quotes the Taoiseach as saying that "national Constitutions remain supreme in the national sphere". That is similar to the US, where states have their own historically inherited constitutions. However, each is subject to the US federal constitution.
Former Minister Justin Keating has the honesty to agree with me - and with Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, whom I quoted in my article, that the proposed EU Constitution is that of a federal European state.
Ultimately the people of Ireland will decide if they want to maintain the primacy of Ireland's Constitution.
The EU claims to be founded on democracy. If that is the case can we now have a guarantee from the Taoiseach, the political parties and President McAleese, guardian of Ireland's Constitution, that if the referendum on the EU Constitution is rejected by the Irish people, their democratic decision will be respected and upheld and the proposed EU Constitution will not be put to us again? - Yours, etc.,
DANA ROSEMARY SCALLON, Claregalway, Co Galway.