Madam, – Martin Kerr is right about being excluded from Irish decision-making (August 31st). He and I and one and a half million Irish people in the northeast have now, thanks to the abandoning of part of an Irish Constitution, the same citizens’ rights as Chinese residents in Birmingham. Recognised as belonging to a noble race, but with only as many civil and legal rights as a government in London cares to give us.
Happily the Government in Dublin has “a right to express opinions ” about this.
So has a local council in Beijing. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – John Regan (July 22nd) claimed that Article 311 of the Lisbon Treaty will give the EU power to establish new categories of own resources and therefore power to raise an EU tax.
This is not correct. The EC Treaty currently provides that the member-states may agree unanimously to provide for mechanisms to raise the EU budget (known as the EU’s “own resources”). This arrangement is continued by the Lisbon Treaty under Article 311.
In its recent judgment on the Lisbon Treaty the German Constitutional Court held that Article 311 “will still have to be understood as a statement of intent regarding policies and programmes which does not establish a competence.”
Finally, the guarantees provided by the EU member-states to Ireland in June state that “nothing in the Treaty of Lisbon makes any change of any kind, for any member-state, to the extent or operation of the competence of the European Union in relation to taxation”. The position could not be clearer: Lisbon does not change the position of either the EU or Ireland on matters of taxation. – Yours,etc,
DAVID GEARY,
Chairman,
Solicitors for Europe,
Harcourt Centre, Dublin 2.
Madam, – Pat Hynes (August 25th) accuses me of spreading misinformation because I asked the question: “How many troops must be deployed before Dáil approval is needed” (August 21st), yet he ignores the dishonesty of the Irish Government’s claims to be a neutral state. He claims he knows that I was aware of the contents of Section 2(2)(b) of the Defence (Amendment) No 2 Act of 1960. This is untrue, but I am now aware, thanks to his letter and a study of the Act, that the Irish Government can send up to 12 Irish soldiers to any number of overseas missions without Dail approval.
A study of this section and Defence Forces website is revealing. The Act states: (2) A contingent of the Permanent Defence Force may be despatched for service outside the State with a particular International United Nations Force without a resolution approving of such despatch having been passed by Dáil Éireann if, but only if – (a) that International United Nations Force is unarmed, or (b) the contingent consists of not more than 12 members of the Permanent Defence Force . . ., or (c) the contingent is intended to replace, in whole or in part, or reinforce a contingent of the Permanent Defence Force serving outside the State . . .
First, the use of the term “International United Nations Force” in the Act is open to various interpretations, and has been taken by the Irish Government as permitting them to send Irish troops to serve overseas with the UN, EU, Nato, Nato (Partnership for Peace) and OSCE, provided these forces have some sort of UN approval.
Second, the so-called Triple Lock, that claims to require a combination of Government, Dáil and UN approval before sending Irish troops overseas has too many bypass mechanisms.
Under the present legislation, any number of Irish troops could be sent overseas without Dáil approval, provided that they were divided over different missions with each Irish contingent limited to 12 soldiers. Irish soldiers are serving with 10 separate overseas missions at present, including: EUFor Bosnia (44 Irish soldiers), MINURCAT Chad/CAR (400), KFor Kosovo (221), ISAF Afghanistan (seven), MINURSO Western Sahara (three), MONUC Congo (three), Unifil Lebanon (seven), UNMIK Kosovo (four), UNOCI Côte d’Ivoire (two), UNTSO Middle East (14).
The Irish Defence Forces seem to be chasing after every dogfight in town, rather than focusing on clearly defined United Nations peacekeeping operations, as was the case up until the Balkans conflicts in the 1990s. This is a dangerous inefficient scattergun type policy.
In addition, Section 2, (2), (c) above would appear for example to allow the Government to send 5,000 or more additional Irish troops to reinforce the existing 44 troops serving with EUFor in Bosnia, without getting Dáil approval.
Ireland, as a small former neutral state, should stop behaving like an imperial power. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – In the email exchange with Pat Cox (Opinion, August 29th) Joe Higgins MEP quoted selectively from Article 52 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and proposed that the charter, and the treaty, is “institutionalising the rights of business to exploit workers in the name of the social market”. In a statement on June 18th he claimed that the EU treaties and the charter give priority to the rights of business to make a profit. Both claims are factually incorrect.
The quote that Mr Higgins uses from Article 52 which covers the scope of guaranteed rights, and states that “Rights recognised by the Charter which are based on Community Treaties, shall be exercised under the conditions and within the limits defined by those Treaties” is the second of three paragraphs in this Article. This paragraph simply states that Charter Articles that derive from the Treaty have the same purpose as they have in the Treaty. It would be rather odd if they meant something different to the Treaty.
The first paragraph of Article 52 states that any limitation on charter rights must be provided by law and respect the essence of those rights, while the final paragraph states that rights that derive from the European Convention on Human Rights have the same meaning as laid down by the convention.
Some charter Articles have the treaty as their sole source. Article 36 on protection for public services derives solely from Treaty Article 16, and the paragraph of Article 52 that Mr Higgins quotes simply states that they have the same purpose. The main sources of the charter Articles that relate to workers’ rights are the European Social Charter and the Community Charter of the Fundamental Social Rights for Workers. In a number of charter Articles such as Article 23 on equality between men and women, the treaty is an additional source – in this case Article 141 on the right to equal pay. There is not a shred of evidence to present any of this as a negative in terms of workers’ rights. In fact it was the European Court of Justice in a 1976 ground- breaking judgment that gave real force to the fight for equal pay for women.
The statements by Mr Higgins that the Ruffert European Court judgment allowed for payment of only 50 per cent of the agreed pay rate, and that the Luxembourg judgment ruled that it was illegal for that country to insist on social protections for posted workers are not correct. The main issue in both judgments was that the European Court of Justice ruled that both Luxembourg and Germany had failed to properly transpose the Posting of Workers Directive into their domestic law.
However, there are some concerns for trade unions arising out of the approach taken by the European Court of Justice in some of these judgments. The Declaration on Workers’ Rights secured by the Irish Government last June will assist the ongoing process to address these concerns.
The current treaty provides in Article 43 a right of establishment (business), and in Article 49 a right to provide services in any member-state, and this has given rise to a concern that these “economic freedoms” may take precedence over workers’ rights.
The Lisbon Treaty in Article 6 would give the charter the same legal value as the current treaty Articles thus giving workers’ rights a new and enhanced status. This represents a rebalancing of rights in favour of workers which future European Court of Justice judgments will then have to take account of.
All of the treaty revisions since we joined in 1973 have added new Articles that protect and promote workers’ rights, and the Lisbon Treaty with the Charter of Fundamental Rights is a further significant advance.
All of the evidence shows that the advancement of workers’ rights in this country is almost singlehandedly due to our membership of the European Union. This evidence can be viewed on our website at www.thechartergroup.ie. – Yours, etc,