Madam, - As an adviser to the Oireachtas delegation to the Convention which drafted the EU Constitution I must comment on Mary Lou McDonald's quite extraordinary letter (April 7th) in which she asserts that none of the amendments proposed by the Convention were accepted by the Praesidium in drafting the text. This is simply untrue.
Some 6,000 amendments - including many duplicates and many which were contradictory - were tabled in the months of debate which led to the final consensus. They related to the reports of working groups and to draft articles of the final document.
They came from individual members, from political groups and from institutional representatives. Many arose from interaction between Convention members and civil society bodies and NGOs.
These amendments were taken into account by the Praesidium in the drafting process and many were adopted in full or as inputs to the revision of whole chapters. For example, my notes on the session of June 11th to 13th, 2003 detail the acceptance of some two dozen amendments to critical texts on institutions, on the Charter of Fundamental Rights and on the controversial Preamble.
Full revisions of Part 1 and of key Protocols were produced.
Mary Lou McDonald, among others, continually calls for an open and serious debate on the Constitution. There is little hope of achieving this if statements which are clearly at variance with the facts are made and repeated.
It would also greatly help if Sinn Féin ended its effective boycott of the work of the National Forum on Europe. - Yours, etc.,
TONY BROWN, Bettyglen, Raheny, Dublin 5.
Madam, - Michael McLoughlin (April 6th) suggests that my claim that the proposed EU constitutional treaty reduces democracy is preposterous.
He is talking through his hat, of course. The proposed EU Constitution would abolish nearly 70 existing national vetoes and give these as extra powers to the EU. When areas of national policy are shifted to Brussels, the EU Commissioners, whom nobody elects, extend their powers, for they have the monopoly of proposing EU laws for the new policy areas concerned - laws which the EU Council of Ministers then makes on the basis of the Commissioners' proposals.
The Council of Ministers is an oligarchy of 25 politicians who are irremovable as a group. The EU Parliament cannot initiate or propose any law. It can propose amendments to most of the laws that come from the Council of Ministers but it cannot force any of these amendments on the Council or Commission against their will.
If the Council and Commission will not accept the Parliament's amendments, it has a power of veto over most draft Council of Ministers laws by an absolute majority of its members - that is the Parliament's total membership plus one.
This rarely happens, however, because the Parliament, Council and Commission are generally all ad idem on increasing EU powers at the expense of national parliaments - and of course of the citizens that elect these, which is you and me. So the primary EC/EU legislator if the Council of Ministers.
There is a protocol to the proposed Constitution which says that if one-third of National Parliaments - one third, mind you! - think that a proposed EU law violates the so-called "principle of subsidiarity" - that is, that the EU is seeking to do things that are better done at national level - they can protest to the Commission which proposes EU laws, and the Commission must reconsider its proposal.
But having reconsidered it, the Council can still go ahead with it. So this is not a power at all. this is the so-called "yellow card" that Michael McLoughlin refers to.
There was a proposal in Giscard d'Estaing's Convention that drew up this Constitution to the effect that if two-thirds of the national Parliaments objected, the proposal would have to be dropped altogether, but that was abandoned.
The Constitution's advocates are trying to make out that this Protocol represents a huge increase in the powers of national Parliaments. This is totally absurd. - Yours, etc.,
ROBERT BALLAGH, Broadstone, Dublin 7.