Explanatory Background

A new and different European Union:

As is clear from the first of the two key sentences above from the proposed amendment to the Irish Constitution which we shall be voting on in the referendum, the Treaty of Lisbon would create a quite new Federal EU which politically and constitutionally would be fundamentally different from the EU which was established by the 1993 Maastricht Treaty and which we are members of today. The same name, “The European Union”, would be used pre-Lisbon and post-Lisbon for two quite different Unions. Why is this deception necessary? Lisbon is a revamped version of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe which gave the EU its own State Constitution superior to the constitutions of its Member States, but which the peoples of France and Holland rejected in referendums in 2005. Instead of accepting that decision, the EU Prime Ministers and Presidents decided to give the EU a Constitution indirectly rather than directly, but not to call it a Constitution, and on no account to hold referendums on it, for fear people would reject it again.

Why an Irish referendum?:

Because the Supreme Court laid down in the 1987 Crotty case that sovereignty in Ireland rests with the Irish people and that only they can surrender sovereignty to the EU by referendum, or refuse to surrender it, as the case might be. The purpose of the Lisbon referendum would be to change the Irish Constitution so as to enable the State to accede to the new European Union which Lisbon would establish and to make the Constitution and laws of this new EU superior to the Irish Constitution and laws in all areas covered by the Treaty. This is clear from the two key sentences quoted above.

admin @ May 22, 2008