There remain compelling reasons for voting No in the Nice referendum and nothing the Government has done or Ministers have said has weakened those reasons, including the declarations issued from the Seville EU summit at the weekend. In fact what Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowen and others have said, in the last few days particularly, strengthens the case for voting no.
The main is reason for voting No is simply this: the EU is an undemocratic project and the Nice Treaty exacerbates the undemocratic nature of the project.
It is undemocratic because the most powerful institution in the union, the Council of Ministers, is democratically unaccountable. Of course individual ministers who form the council are accountable to their national parliaments for their general conduct but as members of the Council of Ministers they are not accountable and cannot be. This is because the council operates in secret, even enacts legislation in secret - the only other legislative body worldwide that operates in secret is the parliament of North Korea.
Only in areas where there remains a veto can there be accountability. Where decisions are taken on issues requiring unanimity, everyone knows their minister did not exercise the veto and he/she can be held accountable when that arises. The Nice Treaty worsens the undemocratic nature of the European Union because it cuts back on the issues on which the veto applies. There are other persuasive reasons for voting No, the most obvious being the contempt by the European and Irish political establishment for the verdict of the people on precisely this issue last year.
The constitution of the European Union provides for changes to be made to that constitution only with the assent of each member-state. The Irish State, through its people, has said no, therefore the proposed change to the constitution of the union cannot happen. The refusal to accept that outcome is an expression of contempt for the Irish people and is characteristic of the attitude of the Euro elite to the people of Europe generally.
There is yet another reason for voting No. It is that the text of the constitutional change to the foundation of the EU is impenetrable, written for the European elite and indecipherable except to those with the patience and expertise to analyse a complex legal treaty. On the basis of that impenetrability alone, the Irish people were right to reject the treaty and will be right to reject it again.
I argue for another rejection of the treaty from a position of being in favour of the European project (the suggestion that voting No again will distance ourselves from the EU is balderdash and if it isn't balderdash then there is menace to the EU project which we should be told about before we go any further).
I do so also from a position of agnosticism on the issue of neutrality. I see no objection to joining a defence pact with our partners in the European Union which would provide for us to go to the defence of any member-state that was attacked by a state outside the union.
I see a lot of objection to any commitment on our part to join in expeditions, such as the assault on Afghanistan, the assault on Iraq and on Yugoslavia, and a lot of objection to any interpretation of "defence" that amounts to "offence", which is how America understands it. But these issues are not at stake in the Nice Treaty or appear to me at this stage not to be.
I am also enthusiastically in favour of the enlargement of the union. In fact I favour greater enlargement than is now envisaged, for instance by the incorporation of Turkey and opening the way for north African states, especially Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia to join. (I am not dissuaded from that view by the pedantry of geography).
But I do not agree there has to be a trade-off between enlargement and democracy. Why can't the two go hand in hand? David Byrne, our EU Commissioner, Pat Cox, the president of the European Parliament, and other Euro groupies agree (or seem to agree) to the complaint about the undemocratic nature of the European Union but say that will be put right by the convention on the future of Europe.
Why can't it be made right at this time? What's the problem?
It could be done quite simply by including in the Nice Treaty (or as an amendment to it) that the proceedings of the Council of Ministers shall be in public and ministers at such council meetings shall require the mandate of their national parliaments for policy and legislative decisions.
That could have been agreed at Seville if the necessary groundwork had been laid and it could be endorsed by the member-states well before enlargement takes place but nobody wanted to bother. The option to bully the Irish electorate into reversing its decision was preferable either because of the inconvenience of making such a change at this stage or because there is no will to make the change. Either way, we should not have it.