Those "Ungrateful" Irish

This article on the Irish referendum on the EU really deserves to be read in full. An abridged version follows:

How can the Irish be so ungrateful? That is the question being asked by EU officials (in private) and by EU supporters (in public) as the Irish go to the polls this Thursday to vote on whether to accept the Lisbon Treaty on the expansion of European Union institutions. The fact that the ‘No’ lobby seems to be gaining ground – in a country that has benefited enormously from EU subsidies! – has led to an orgy of bile-ridden attacks on truculent, thick and thankless Irish voters.

The message is clear: the Irish should know their place in the European set-up and slavishly bow and scrape before their paymasters in Brussels. Anything else would be ‘extraordinarily ungrateful’, according to one commentator (1). Welcome to the ‘democratic’ EU – where most countries are bypassing their electorates and simply ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, and where the one country that is holding a referendum – Ireland – has been subjected to the kind of financial, political and emotional blackmail that would make even Imelda Marcos squirm.

In order for the Lisbon Treaty on EU enlargement to come into effect on 1 January 2009, all 27 member states must ratify it. So far, 15 countries have forced it through their parliaments, and another 11 are in the process of doing so. But Ireland – population: 4.3million – is the only EU member state constitutionally bound to hold a referendum and put the Treaty to the will of the people. EU officials and supporters are sweating and fretting over the possibility that Irish voters – ‘any clown with a pen’, as one writer charmingly referred to them – will torpedo the Treaty (2).

This echoes the attacks on Irish voters when they rejected the EU’s Nice Treaty in a referendum in June 2001. Back then, 54 per cent of voters said ‘No thanks’. ‘The best pupils of the European class have spat in the soup’, spat the French newspaper Liberation in 2001: ‘The blow is all the more treacherous in that it comes from a country that owes its new wealth to Europe.’ (7) ‘Those ungrateful Irish’, said a headline in The Economist, reminding truculent anti-Nice voters that ‘when Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973, the country’s income per head was about 60 per cent of the community’s average; it is now around 120 per cent’ (8).

In 2002, under extreme pressure from the EU, the Irish state found a neat way to get around the inconvenient fact of a ‘No’ vote to the Nice Treaty – it simply held a second referendum (in a shameless act of political Double Jeopardy) and devoted its not-inconsiderable political and media machinery to demanding that voters make the ‘right decision’ this time (9). Pro-Nice posters reminded the ungrateful Irish about everything they had received from the EU. ‘Thirty billion Euros since 1973’, the posters said, while Irish ministers warned ominously that a second rejection of Nice could ‘return Ireland to poverty’ (10). This time, the ‘Yes’ lobby won: in October 2002, 62.89 per cent of voters supported Nice.

The attacks on Irish voters for being ‘extraordinarily ungrateful’ – both for initially rejecting Nice in 2001 and for even thinking about saying ‘No’ to Lisbon this week – reveal a great deal about ‘democracy’ in the EU. The EU’s bureaucrats and backers seem dumbfounded that they cannot buy Irish people’s support; they find it ‘hard to fathom’ that a people who have received subsidies worth billions of Euros are not falling in line behind their rulers. It is the mark of corrupt, degenerate and anti-democratic elitism to believe that you can buy people’s votes. Indeed, in many civilised, democratic countries it is illegal for political parties to offer voters financial reward for their ballots. Yet, Mafioso-style, EU backers are telling the Irish: ‘You’ve received your monies – now do as we say.’