SEAMUS RATIGAN,
Sir, - The Government's announced intention of re-running the Nice Treaty referendum is a stunning exercise in hypocrisy.
The fig-leaf of some hastily cobbled together "protocol" agreed over the coffee tables in Barcelona, as a minor side-issue at the EU summit, is not a good enough response to the expressed will of the Irish people who voted against the Treaty.
I should say, also, that it is the people who vote who are important, not some imaginary "silent majority" who might have favoured Government policy if the weather had been different.
The Government's hypocrisy on militarisation of the EU, one of the main issues which, unresolved, led to the rejection of the Treaty, was underlined recently by a massive NATO military exercise in North Western Poland at the Polish Army's largest training ground close to the German border near Stettin. 15,000 NATO troops from several countries, including elements from the so-called European Rapid Reaction Force, were involved. The purpose of this exercise? To train NATO military personnel in suppression of civilian resistance to NATO military operations!
The Polish Army, ever anxious to please its new NATO allies, provided thousands of "volunteers" and bussed in more civilians from nearby towns to be "baton-charged", "tear-gassed", "arrested" and "imprisoned" en masse in specially prepared "compounds" at the site.
If the suppression of civilian political dissent is now the priority of NATO/ERRF, who can blame the Irish people for being highly suspicious of this appalling Government's duplicitous record on the preservation of Irish neutrality and its misinformation and lies on the purpose of the so-called ERRF? - Yours, etc.,
SEAMUS RATIGAN,
Dublin 8.