Our world is changing rapidly, not least our EU role, but endorsing the Lisbon Treaty is merely to update the rule book, writes Tony Kinsella
FEAR IS the normal instinctive human reaction to a threat, but we use knowledge, experience and intelligence to analyse and process that fear and to determine our best course of action. There is much in today's world that threatens many realities which we have taken as normal for years, if not decades.
The United States of America has been a "big brother" since we first began to look at our world. US society is familiar from cinema and television screens, books and magazines. Many of us have family or personal ties to people and places across the Atlantic in an English-speaking nation, which help make the US that bit closer, that bit less foreign, for many Irish people.
Developments in business, science, culture, even in language flowed from West to East. We tended to at least glance towards Washington for leadership in moments of global crisis - even if we did not always agree with what our American cousins decided.
We knew subconsciously that with the end of the cold war the relative power of the US would decline. The match was over and both the winning and the losing teams would have to leave the pitch.
We now look out at a world in profound mutation. The outgoing Bush presidency, rather than carefully managing the transition in US status, has pointlessly hurled its leadership away in the sands of Iraq.
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel regrets that "we have done terrible damage to our own country and undermined our interests in the world . . . Trust is the crucial currency in international relations. We wilfully diminished the value of this currency."
The New York Times, in an editorial comment on this week's Senate report, notes: "We cannot say with certainty whether Mr Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public - or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true - that is bad enough." The selection by the Democratic Party of Barack Obama as its candidate speaks volumes about the degree of change the US is facing.
We, deep down, realise that in future crises we will have to look to unfamiliar places - Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia - the capitals of countries we hardly know, whose languages most of us do not speak, for responses.
Most frighteningly of all, we may have to look to ourselves, within the EU, for part of those answers.
We have understood, in an academic way, that the days of cheap oil, bigger cars and snazzy SUVs would one day end. We just never really thought that it was something we would directly experience ourselves every time we filled up. Oil production just about matches demand at about 85 million barrels a day.
The slightest hiccup and demand exceeds supply - and the price rises. A real shortage of diesel refining capacity in Europe exacerbates the price pressure on that particular fuel. Oil prices are high, and are going to stay that way. We have to change.
Irish people are probably better positioned than most to appreciate the impact of increased wealth on diet and habits. China, India and Brazil between them account for well over a third of the Earth's population. As their people prosper, they eat differently and consume more. When demand increases from a third of the planet, supply struggles to catch up and prices rise.
Rising demand is good news for business, good news for farmers, and eventually good for economic growth. Understanding that on an intellectual level does little, however, to calm our emotional anxieties as we watch prices of many staples inexorably rise.
Most of us understood that the glory days of massive EU transfers to Ireland would end. It is in itself amazing that EU taxpayers were prepared to fund Irish roads, hospitals, universities and sewage systems to help bring one of the poorest member states up to the union average. It is less surprising that once Ireland made it beyond that average, this largesse was re-directed to those who are worse off.
We all knew that the heady days of the Celtic Tiger would not roar forever, that eventually the vertiginous rise in house prices and the gush of consumer credit would, one day, begin to slow.
Knowing something is likely to happen does not, in the end of the day, provide all that much of a cushion when the inevitable comes to pass.
So we find ourselves in the middle of 2008 confronted with a panoply of changes and a host of uncertainties. Changes and uncertainties that leave us wondering, with some degree of unavoidable ignorance, about our lifestyles, our children's aspirations, even our planet's future.
We are asked to endorse actively a fairly illegible document, the Lisbon Treaty, which tweaks existing mechanisms to help us all address our uncertain future.
We are asked to have confidence in ourselves and to make a few changes to our common European rulebook. Changes which, for the most part, simply spell out the mechanics of things we have already agreed to in the Nice and other treaties.
We are asked to embrace a political response to the myriad challenges we face - after decades of being encouraged to prefer economic solutions to political ones.
The EEC we joined back in 1972 had six members. Today's EU has 27, tomorrow's could reach 39. It needs a rulebook to match. The one it has managed to agree on is called the Lisbon Treaty.
We can listen to our instinctive fears and huddle down. Or we can draw on our knowledge, our experience, and our intelligence to analyse, to process and to hope.
Vote No for Fear. Vote Yes for Hope. The choice is ours." We can listen to instinctive fears and huddle down. Or we can draw on our experience and our intelligence to analyse and to hope