Sir, - The silly season arrived early this year. Some 400,000 of the electorate, or less than the population of Manchester city, tells more than 500 million Europeans to shove the Nice Treaty. Most of these people fear vital democratic rights will be removed by Nice, yet are happy that a minute minority in the EU, a mere pinhead, holds up the democratic wishes of the rest of the community.
Others in the No camp are hardline anti-abortionists, whose anti-feminist views are not shared by most European women. Yet others are militant republicans seeking neutrality while they hold bunkers of illegal arms.
Now add to this weird amalgam, de Valera's me-feiner heirs, three tooth-and-claw capitalists (Mary Harney, Charlie McCreevy and the unelected Michael McDowell), and the melange is complete.
Mr McDowell referred to the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland in his speech to the European Institute of Foreign Affairs. Alice in Wonderland is a good analogy in this context, but even the Mad Hatter would be overcome by such a crowd of gadabouts at his table!
But let's not forget the Irish tradition of being swayed by "little islander" nationalists. A miniscule bunch of extremists with no mandate in 1916 decided to form an "ourselves alone" society. In 1948 Costello and MacBride took us abruptly out of the British Commonwealth, preferring introspection to sharing our traditions and cultures with similar peoples around the world.
We are a generous people, but sadly too often xenophobia prevails and we fail to put behind us the values of another era that have nothing to do with the new multinational, secular and tolerant Europe. Surely this is the message of the No vote. Let's hope the silly season will be well behind us when we vote again, or else we will rightly be considered the dodos of Europe, not the success story. - Yours, etc.,
Robert Rochfort, Earlscourt, Waterford.