I voted Yes to the Lisbon Treaty because, in my view, we are long past the point when a real choice was possible, writes John Waters
A MAN and his wife have a difference of opinion about where to go for a weekend away. The husband says Rome, the wife London. In the end, they toss for it and the wife wins. The husband has a choice: he can spend the weekend lamenting that London is not Rome, or he can embrace London on the basis that the issue has been definitively and fairly decided.
This is nowadays my attitude to the EU. Yesterday I voted Yes, despite years of voting and campaigning for No votes in respect of what we call "Europe". I voted Yes because, in my view, we are long past the point when a real choice was possible.
Sometime later today we will know definitively the result of the Lisbon vote. I anticipate that it will be a more decided Yes than we have been led to expect. But, one way or another, this referendum will have been characterised most pointedly by the growth it has tracked in 11th-hour opposition to the furtherance of the European project.
In a certain light you might take this as a tribute to the quality of Irish democracy, evidence of our maturity. Except I have a very clear memory that maturity is precisely what, for many years, was suggested as the basis for voting Yes. It is strange to be listening to people making, for what seems to be the first time in 2008, arguments that for many years we were told were backward and inward-looking.
Years ago, during the debates about Maastricht and Amsterdam, when we pointed up the democratic deficit, the potential loss of sovereignty and the dangers to our constitutional integrity, we were told that Europe was the forward-looking, modern option, the sign of our new maturity.
I remember the vehemence with which people would attack us back then for suggesting that there were implications for sovereignty, neutrality and the Irish Constitution.
Didn't we understand that this kind of talk was utterly redundant in 1980s/1990s Ireland? Couldn't we see that nationalism was a dying force and that the future resided in supranational entities and institutions? Did we not understand that we were all Europeans now?
I recall standing on platforms with that late and very great gentleman, Raymond Crotty, trying to persuade our fellow citizens that we could do better on our own. But our proposals concerning, for example, an intensive organic farming model of the Irish economy were rather abruptly interrupted by fellow citizens asking if we had nine billion quid to give them for voting No.
One of the main differences between now and then is that No campaigners no longer feel bound to to offer any alternative concept of how Ireland might make its way forward. Nowadays No simply means no. It never mattered before that EU treaties were incomprehensible, but now, suddenly, it does.
Sometimes I took literally those accusations of immaturity and occasionally felt quite dismayed at my own backwardness. To be arguing for an Ireland sustained by its own lights and energies, without dependencies or obligations to outsiders, might indeed be a sign of profound immaturity, especially when nobody else appeared to think it a viable option. Today, one of the first things visitors remark on about the Irish countryside is the scarcity of tillage - this in a country with perhaps the most marketable green brand in the world. I tell them that, for 35 years, Irish farmers have been paid large amounts of money to sit in their houses with the nettles growing up to their back doors.
These experiences make me feel there is something out of sync about the present sudden surge in Euroscepticism, as though we have regressed to some pre-maturity stage of thinking, which implies that the maturity was never present to begin with.
Another possibility is that, back then, we were not so mature after all, but simply acquiescing in a process which put us in hock to Europe and unable to imagine any other way of being. Incapable of saying no to the largesse being dangled by the Eurocrats, we dressed up need and greed as evidence of modernity.
The problem is that now it is too late to opt for any kind of alternative. The core concept of development pursued in Ireland over the past two or three decades has centred on the creation of a cuckoo-in-the-nest economy, in which foreign investors undertake to provide employment here in return for certain benefits. This model of economy is intimately bound up with our membership of the EU, and would be impossible to alter without enormous trauma and pain.
Strangely, although still a sceptic, I have come to believe that, yes, we are all Europeans now, and it isn't all bad. The influx of east European immigrants since 2004 has in my view greatly enhanced this society, its economy and culture. I don't think the economic model we have opted for is ideal, but it is the one we have chosen and it has worked well on its own terms.
Having offered an alternative and had this rejected, I came to realise that you cannot all your life argue against a choice that has already been made. I refuse to walk around the Tate Modern brooding about the charms of St Peter's.