Who are the Scaremongers?

Well, exams have been sat (and, let us hope, passed) and I am now able to give more time to the campaign against the Lisbon Treaty. From now until 2 October, this blog will concern itself with that campaign and not so much with CSP issues.

And the campaign needs all the help it can get. On opening the Irish Independent this morning, I was greeted by the following platitude by Fionnan Sheahan:

"More than a vote on the Lisbon Treaty itself, it is a vote on Ireland's relationship with the Union".

This is utterly typical of the Euro-fanatics. They always go from the specific to the general in their arguments. Point out some grave flaw in an EU Treaty (like, you know, the slashing of Ireland's voting weight in the Council, the creation of a common European policy in areas like immigration and defence, the abolition of our right to appoint our own Commissioner) and they will reply with an impatient wave of the hand. "But you must look at the big picture" they insist. "This isn't about the Treaty, it's about whether or not we want to stay in Europe!"

Listen. We're IN Europe. We were evangelizing Europe some 1,400 years before the EU was ever dreamt of. But since we're talking about the EU: we're in that too. Voting No to Lisbon will not remove us from the EU. It will not remove us from the Common Market. It will not restrict our freedom of movement within the Union. End of story.

What infuriates me most about statements like Sheahan's above is that the Yes side are generally the ones who accuse the No side of "scaremongering", when the reality is the exact opposite. In fact, the Yes side's arguments consist almost entirely of scaremongering: loss of foreign investment, loss of jobs, some vague, unspecified retribution from other EU countries.

Recently a Yes-supporting colleague told me that the No side's arguments were also grounded in prophecies of doom. That may be true, but there is one major difference between us and the Yessers: We ground our arguments in the text of the Treaty, they do not. We know that Lisbon will result in less democracy, more militarisation, ECJ control over our human rights because the Treaty itself says that it will. The Yes side have no authority for their apocalyptic claims. That needs to be pointed out to people at every opportunity.