Madam, - There is a significant error in the Irish Times summary of the main points of the Lisbon Treaty which was carried, without attribution, on December 14th, the day after the Treaty was signed. I have only just read this as I have been abroad on holiday, but as some readers may have cut out this treaty summary for future reference, may I offer a correction?
Your summary states that while under the Lisbon Treaty the number of EU commissioners would be fewer than the number of member-states, "each member-state gets the right to appoint a commissioner in rotation".
In fact, this right of appointment by each member-state would disappear under the Lisbon Treaty. Article 1.18 (9D.7) of the new Treaty provides that the present right of each EU member-state to "propose" a national commissioner and to have that proposal accepted by the others would be replaced by a right to make "suggestions" regarding a name, but with no guarantee that its suggestions would be accepted.
This new provision implies that under the Lisbon Treaty proposals a process of bargaining would take place over different possible candidates for a national commissioner's job between the member-state in question, the President of the Commission and the other member-states which will decide the list of commissioners as a whole by qualified majority vote, subject to a vote of consent by the European Parliament to the full Commission as a body.
If a member-state suggests as its EU Commissioner a candidate who has, for example, antagonised in the past the government of another member-state, or who is not regarded as enthusiastic enough for further EU integration, the state in question may well be asked to suggest someone else as more acceptable.
It is bad enough that under the proposed new treaty Ireland would have no representative at all on the EU Commission, the body which has the monopoly of proposing all European laws, for one out of every three commission terms.
This means that for five years out of every 15, laws affecting all our lives would be put forward entirely by officials from other countries. But when it comes to our turn to be represented on the Commission, the Irish Government would lose its right to decide who the Irish representative should be, and to insist if need be that a particular nomination be accepted as final by the other member-states.
Couple these two proposed changes affecting the EU Commission with the provision of the Lisbon Treaty that European laws made by the Council of Ministers in response to the Commission's proposals will be decided primarily on the basis of member-state population size - which would increase the relative weight of the big countries in EU law-making at the expense of smaller ones like Ireland - and it is clear that the new treaty proposes profound changes in how the constitutionally new Union it would establish would be run.
It is hard to see how these proposed changes are in Ireland's interest. - Yours, etc,
ANTHONY COUGHLAN, Secretary, The National Platform, Dublin 9.
Madam, - Dick Humphreys (January 2nd) claims that Ireland will not be the laughing stock of Europe should we fail to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon on the basis that both France and The Netherlands remain signed-up EU members following their rejection of the European Constitution.
Yet France in particular is very much the laughing stock of Europe. It is a political embarrassment that a founding member should halt the proposed simplification and improvement of the complex treaty structure, considering that it was Jacques Chirac who endorsed pressuring other states to ratify, with the spectre of forced EU withdrawal in the background. He was quoted in 2004 as saying: "I am not against the idea of using methods of friendly pressure with countries that are refusing the constitution because that blocks all the others."
The rejection of the constitution by France and the Netherlands has led to the absurd situation whereby an almost identical, albeit significantly edited, version of the constitution is proposed. This treaty, however, lacks the clarity and simplification which by the creation of one accessible document would have closed the supposed gap between the EU bureaucracy and its citizens. As Luxembourg's prime minister, Jean Claude Juncker, pointed out, the constitutional treaty was easily intelligible, but Lisbon is very complicated.
In the event of an Irish rejection we would certainly be a laughing stock.
The only possible excuse would be a lack of understanding of the provisions of the proposed treaty by the public, a problem exacerbated by its unnecessarily complicated structure. Not only would we be the laughing stock of Europe but France and The Netherlands would be ridiculed for causing this situation. - Yours, etc,
GRACE O'CONNOR, Rathdrum, Co Wicklow.