Unnecessary rush to push referendums through

Labour has fired the opening salvo this week in the referendum campaign. No, not on Nice, but on the proposed constitutional amendment on disciplinary procedures for judges.

Labour has problems with several aspects of the Bill, claiming that the proposal still does not provide for any lesser penalty than impeachment as a sanction. It also claims that since a two-thirds majority rather than a simple majority is required in both houses of the Oireachtas for impeachment, it will, if passed, make it more rather than less difficult to impeach a judge.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Labour's stance, it does show there is serious material for debate here, which deserves adequate time and space. Instead, it will have to compete with three other referendums - Nice, on abolition of the death penalty and on the ratification of the International Criminal Court.

The positive spin on having four referendums on the same day is that it saves taxpayers' money and minimises movement of people at a time when all due vigilance must be exercised regarding foot-and-mouth. The less positive spin, and I suspect the accurate one, is that it serves to distract attention from the implications of the Nice Treaty and increases the probability that Nice will actually be passed.

Nor are the proposed referendums other than Nice uncontroversial. To take disciplinary procedures for judges, there is a delicate balance to be struck between accountability and preserving the independence of the judiciary. This week, Brian Cowen indicated that the referendums would probably be in early June. That is a ridiculously short lead-in time.

The Referendums Commission will have an impossible job. It will have to struggle with submissions on four Bills and synthesise and present the pros and cons of each in a matter of weeks. It is an open secret that most of the major political parties in the Dail, with the exception of the Greens, are deeply unhappy that they are precluded by the McKenna judgment from spending taxpayers' money on one side only of an issue in a referendum.

The commission has had to work in difficult situations previously, and hasn't done too bad a job, but it could be doing much more if it were given adequate runin time to referendums. In this instance, there is absolutely no reason to rush. The Treaty of Nice will not come into effect until all the member-states ratify it, which will not be for another 18 months or more. Is the Government so fearful of real debate that it cannot bear the idea of allowing people to set out in careful and reasoned terms what their various positions are?

At a guess, if the average citizen were asked to say what they would be voting on in early June, many would be unable to name the four issues which will be laid before them. Fewer still would be able to say exactly what we are voting for in Nice. Citizens across Europe, for very varying reasons, disapprove of its ratification, but there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

So is it a case of politicians here taking the privilege of the exercise of democracy seriously? No. The impression being given by senior Government ministers here is that the only reason for having a referendum at all is to avoid the tiresome possibility that some maverick citizen might challenge the constitutionality of ceding still more power to Brussels. The memory of Raymond Crotty is not exactly treasured by our political masters.

There are real constitutional issues at stake. We are ceding a substantive amount of power to Brussels. We will have three fewer MEPs, we will have revolving commissioners and we will have qualified majority voting in 30 new areas. One of the most unpleasant spins on Nice is the idea that one could only be opposed to it for selfish reasons. Either we do not want to share the wealth which our membership of the EU has allegedly generated, or we want to slap those poor eastern European countries, still emerging from the shadow of communism, in the face.

There is no room at all for a third option - that, as a committed pro-European, one would like Europe to be a genuinely inclusive entity. Instead, we are heading inexorably towards being a monstrously centralised superstate with little or no accountability, particularly towards smaller member-states.

WHAT about wishing the eastern European states could join a genuinely democratic EU? At the moment, the vast majority of citizens are impotent and incapable of influencing in any real way an institution which has implications for every aspect of our lives.

Most Irish people have no desire to keep out the other potential member-states, but delaying their entry by perhaps a year, in the hopes that they would be joining a more democratic and open place, is hardly wishing to slap them in the face.

Even Brian Cowen conceded during the week, in an interview with Pat Kenny, that he believes that "despite the importance. . .of the EU to all citizens in Europe, there is an unfortunate failure to identify with these institutions and I think some of that is this feeling that the division of competences is not in a way which makes sense to ordinary citizens".

Loosely translated, that means that many people worry that decisions which should be taken at local level are being taken at EU level, further and further from the realm of influence of the average citizen. How right you are, Brian, about those worries. Why does tackling this have to be deferred until after Nice, until the next inter-governmental conference in 2004? Surely the sane thing to do would have been to tackle this before enlargement?

Of course, the Government is highly selective about what being a good European signifies. When it comes to opposition to Nice, only nasty regressive types opposed to European unity could possibly have any objections. Yet when the EU proposes that all asylum-seekers be allowed to work after six months, opposing that measure, as our Government does, is not anti-European or selfish, but a necessary preservation of sovereignty.

Double standards indeed.

bobrien@irish-times.ie