Madam, - "Pooling" sovereignty is really a euphemism for surrendering it, claims Ruairí Quinn (Letters, May 3rd).
Sovereignty, in the precise, classical meaning of the word, refers to the exclusive right of a State - and its parliament and people if it is a representative democracy - to make its own laws rather than have them made wholly or mainly by others.
The great majority of the 190 or so states that make up the international community are sovereign in this sense, the exception being the 25 members of the EU. These now have some two-thirds of their laws made in Brussels in a process over which their national electorates have very little control. Talk of "pooling" sovereignty is like speaking of a woman being half-pregnant.
When the College Green Parliament voted itself out of existence under the 1800 Act of Union, it was an analogous pooling of sovereignty to what Ruairí Quinn extols. Yet even though that gave Ireland one-sixth of the membership of the UK Parliament, which gave us more influence on UK legislation than we have in most areas of current EU law-making, the Irish people decided after a century's experience that they would be better off independent and making their own laws.
Ruairí Quinn asks me to explain why none of the EU states want to leave it and why others want to join.
May I suggest that a key reason is this: at national level, if a minister wants to get something done, he or she must have a majority in support of the proposed measure in the national parliament, and implicitly in the country as a whole.
At national level, ministers are thus accountable to others.
Remove the relevant policy area to Brussels, however, and the minister in question, who is part of the executive arm of government nationally, is transformed into a supranational legislator at EU level, one of 25 members of the EU Council of Ministers, making laws for 450 million Europeans behind closed doors, often on the basis of package deals, on first-name terms with the great of the European world.
There is an intoxicating accretion of personal power to the politicians concerned, particularly if they come from small countries, even if they wield only a few votes on the council. There they find themselves members of what is literally an oligarchy, a committee of legislators, that is irremovable as a group. As time passes, they tend to identify ever more with the EU rather than with their own people and come to see their function vis-à-vis their Council of Minister colleagues as delivering their national electorates in support of ever further EU integration.
Simultaneously there is a reduction in the power and competence of their own parliaments and peoples, for these can no longer decide or make laws on the issue in question.
Nor can they make or change a single EU law. I suggest that this process, or something like it, is why national ministers, and aspiring ministers on opposition benches, welcome their state's integration into the EU, for it continually increases their own personal power as supranational legislators and policy-makers at the cost of less power for their national fellow-citizens.
It is a central aim of the European Movement, which Mr Quinn chairs in Ireland, to advance this subversion of national powers further.
The result of course in an ever-widening gulf in all EU countries between politicians and peoples, as the latter find their national democracies hollowed out and they discover that they and the representatives they elect no longer make most of their laws.
Hence the crisis of democracy that is blowing up in the EU, of which the rejection of the proposed EU Constitution by the French and Dutch peoples a year ago is the latest symptom, and which must inevitably in time blow the EU itself apart if it continues on its present course.- Yours, etc,
ANTHONY COUGHLAN, The National Platform, 24 Crawford Ave, Dublin 9.