Photo via dublinhousing.net

Ireland gets closer to second Lisbon Treaty Referendum

The Irish Prime Minister, Brian Cowen, has succeeded in obtaining a vote by EU officials on a series of “guarantees” meant to induce the Irish people to vote in favor of the Lisbon Treaty in a controversial second referendum, reports Hilary White, LifeSiteNews.com. But a leading pro-life and Euro-skeptic grass-roots campaign group, Coir, has said such agreements are meaningless and maintains that the Treaty, that replaces the failed EU Constitution, is a direct threat to Irish sovereignty and the country’s pro-life laws.

“Any doubts that voters had last year are now clearly dealt with,” Prime Minister Cowen said.

Cowen had told EU leaders at a summit in Brussels that agreements hammered out to “sweeten” the Lisbon Treaty for Irish voters would have to be formally ratified. “In order to provide maximum reassurance to the Irish people, I need to be able to come out of our meeting and state, without fear of contradiction, that the legal guarantees will, in time, acquire full Treaty status,” he wrote.

In order to take effect, the Treaty must be ratified by all 27-member states and only Ireland retains its constitutional requirement to hold a national referendum. Despite last year’s unequivocal No vote, Ireland is again set to go to the polls on Libson in the autumn.

Immediately following the 2008 Irish referendum on Lisbon, EU politicians began a campaign of heavy pressure to force the Irish into a second vote, to which many Irish politicians were eager to capitulate. EU committees set about creating a series of “guarantees” that they said would address Irish concerns and render the Treaty more palatable.

In addition to fears of increased taxes and regulations, polls after the 2008 referendum found that 58 percent of those who voted against the Treaty believed that it would make abortion more available in Ireland. Of those who believed Lisbon would make abortion prevalent, a massive 74 percent voted No, according to the Sunday Business Post.

The Irish government has been adamant in their assurance that abortion was not an issue in the Lisbon treaty. Coir, however, points to a vote by government party MEPs after the referendum in support of “reproductive health services” in an EU resolution drawn up by Italian communist MEP Giusto Catani. The same resolution would also force member states that outlaw same-sex “marriage” to grant recognition to those unions contracted in other countries.

The Treaty, Coir said, gives precedence to the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights (ECHR) over the Irish constitution that guarantees the right to life from conception and gives the definition of marriage. Pro-life groups remain concerned that, under the Treaty, sovereignty over abortion and same-sex unions would pass from a national level to an EU level.

Irish Treaty-skeptic Lorcan Mac Mathuna wrote that the Treaty would make the ECHR “a kind of fundamental or constitutional basis for European case law” to set EU-wide precedents. Irish No campaigners are concerned that this would “create a higher court than their own Supreme Court and make national law subservient to the European Court of Justice.”

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TAGS: Ireland Lisbon Treaty Referendum Brian Cowen pro-life laws same-sex unions

[06/23/2009]

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