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Sinn Féin on Lisbon – Waiting for a Revolution
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Sinn Féin’s stance on Lisbon shows us that they remain irredeemable purists. Despite all the evidence that governments across Europe have no stomach for re-opening the decade long reform process, Sinn Féin doggedly persist in arguing for renegotiation (Mary Lou McDonald, IT 2 Dec).
After ten years of painstaking talks, compromises, and fudges, Europe found a formula that all governments could sign. Referenda in France and the Netherlands saw it rejected, yet no essential changes could be made to a formula that is perhaps the only accord that can allow twenty seven nations to move forward. Do Sinn Féin have any grasp of the bewildering multitude of views that political leaders across Europe hold on how the Union should be reformed? The differences are so vast and varied that arriving at Lisbon at all was something of a miracle.
But no matter. Sinn Féin cannot bear surrendering their ideological purity. Not for them a pragmatic compromise. But wait a minute. Isn’t this the party that began by trying to bomb its way to a thirty two county socialist republic, and ended sharing power with Ian Paisely in a devolved UK government? An astonishing compromise by any measure.
Why now the retreat from pragmatism and reality? In the North, Sinn Féin had to painfully relearn the lesson that Collins taught us: seize the best on offer, then build on it.
Lisbon is flawed but workable. It can make Europe more fit for purpose in the twenty first century. We should seize it, and build from there. No point hanging around for a revolution that will never come.
PS: McDonald made a number of points about the workings of the Oireachtas committee which its chair, Paschal Donohoe refutes here.
We voted no to the Nice treaty. We were made to vote again and we voted “Yes” which brought us the “Celtic Tiger” and where we are today. By the way speaking of Sinn Fein, did anyone see Ken Mcgennis on BBC Questiontime last night speaking about the “Celtic Tiger”?
EddieL, are you saying our Yes to Nice brought the Celtic Tiger?
Tomaltach,
An interesting opinion piece rather than analysis of Sinn Fein’s strategy on Lisbon.
You describe SF as irredeemable purists doggedly pursuing something in the face of opposition from all.
Yet only a few lines later you say that :
Referenda in France and the Netherlands saw it rejected, yet no essential changes could be made to a formula that is perhaps the only accord that can allow twenty seven nations to move forward.
Why was it that no essential changes could be made despite the rejections. Was it because such was the purity and beauty of the vision it laid before us that there could be no wavering in the face of the exisiting opposition but yeah we must lead the people to the promised land.
Tomaltach, the kettle is not in a position to call the pot black.
EddieL, are you saying our Yes to Nice brought the Celtic Tiger?
It does seem so.
Nice II occurred in 2002, by which time the tiger was already being declared extinct in the wake of the dot com bust. It rose to roar again of course, but to tie its rise to Nice II is kerrrr-azy.
According to Wikipedia the earliest recorded reference is by Morgan Stanley in 1994!
That would make round 2 of the abortion wars the most relevant referenda. While the right to travel and information are indeed vital elements of free trade and free movement of people, capital, goods & services, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say the Celtic Tiger stemmed from that. Or any other referenda, for that matter.
Besides, I doubt the yes side are going to win over any Cóir types with this line of reasoning. Maybe this is just an oblique attempt to blame the death of the tiger on the no to Lisbon?
Jer,
I don’t think it was a matter of leading people to the promised land. If you examine the various reasons why the Constitution was rejected, you find a myriad of often conflicting opinion. The french left for example felt the thing was too neo-liberal, the right saw it too social. It is more likely that it is neither – and any attempt to tie it solidly in one direction or the other would undoubtedly end in complete failure among governments to sign up.
Lisbon offers no panacea nor promised land. It is far more banal. It is the product of a decade long effort between a large number of nation states to reform the Union under a number of headings so that it might function better.
In my opinion the best weapon the nations of Europe have in the struggle to preserve their peace and prosperity in a world increasingly dominated by giants is through the EU. This applies especially to small states. Lisbon represents a compromise in altering the Union to take into account a bigger and growing Union in an increasingly globalised world. Even if it were in effect tomorrow, our lives wouldn’t change dramatically. It’s more mundane, it just means that the Union would in all likelihood be more capable of shaping its destiny – through an agreed set of measures.
It doesn’t seem at all strange to me that the product of such a prolonged agenda for reform between almost 30 states would end up being far from pretty. There would always be numerous opt outs, dozens of ugly compromises, and swathes of statements that would attempt to keep two opposing views on board. Such is the nature of political negotiation.
Frankly, the idea that one microscopic party in one of the countries should draw up its list of demands – a mile long – is ludicrous. This is not the good Friday agreement, where SF, by dint of their connections to an armed mob, could get away with holding the talks to ransom over list of hundreds of demands.
After a decade of discussion and sign off by 27 governments, the idea that Mary Lou McDonald would produce such a list of grand demands on the Union of 500 million should be comical. But it isn’t comical, it’s tragic that so many people listened to her, especially given that her position is loaded with contradictions and struggles to hide its underlying hypocrisy.
Tomaltach, yes who do Sinn Fein think they are standing in front of the collective will of 500 million europeans. What a picture of David and Goliath. A great image but not an accurate one. Unfortunately its the Irish electorate who voted NO this time. Sinn Fein just laid out a set of options. Yet you call it a tragedy thta people voted one way.
In your own words the constitution and the treaty share the same essential features. Features so essential that they could not be dropped even despite a double (well now a triple) rejection. Its a bit cheeky to say that SF are dogmatists who wont give up. Or is it that the YES side knows whats best for all. If only the people could see the truth.
On SF you very inaccurately say that they ended sharing power with Paisley in a devolved UK govt.
When did that happen.
As I recall the meeting of the executive was repeatedly postponed by Sinn Fein so as to secure the honouring of the St Andrews agreement. This was a position supported by both govts. Was that a mistake or a deliberate misrepresentation.
Your last two paragraphs on SF are a disservice to the previous paragraphs of your post where you sought to argue a reasoned position. Instead it became mud slinging and abuse.
Sinn Fein will lay an argument before the people and they can make there choice. That may gall some who have a vision of where Europe should go thats different to the rest but thats democracy. The least worse form of Govt.
If their position is flawed then articulate the flaws however the YES side will fail again if it resorts to petty name calling and abuse rather than trying to argue the point.
Of course some YES folks used say that the thing about lisbon was that it was too complex to explain to the plebs. Why didnt they have a simpler version. Oh wait a minute they did and that got voted down as well.
Tomaltach: Am I saying our “Yes” to Nice brought the Celtic Tiger?
The Celtic Tiger arrived with the notion that we could have a high cost/debt/spending economy and a race to the bottom in wages/incomes. That is why Mr Cowan(when Min for Finance) wrote to the East European countries saying all were welcome in Ireland. This would not have happened if if we stuck to our guns and rejected Nice and the unsustainable economy we had embarked on. So if we had rejected Nice we would hopefully have been forced to adopt a more common-sense appoach to economics. That is where I am coming from.
EddieL Nice had very very little with ” the unsustainable economy”. that was probably mainly came from the Euro Zone low interest rates.
Of all the things SF did during the Treaty campaign or have done since the vote, lay an argument before the people isn’t one of them. SF’s pitch was that we should reject the Treaty because we’re bound to be able to get something better next time. This mind from the very grouping who opposed Sunningdale so we could end up with the Friday Agreement 20 years later.
There is/was/would be not guarantee that a renegotiation of Lisbon would work out as being a better deal for Ireland. That’s just plain reality. Let me play the engineer for moment. The options are – it could be better, it could be worse, it could be exactly the same. The latter two are the more likely prospects because our goodwill is less now than it was before the vote. I think the best we get is loads of re-endorsements that tax, abortion, etc are all off the table (which they were anyway) and a commitment to revisit the commissioner issue in the next round. But in the next round, our bargaining position will be weaker because other states will say you’re getting your commissioner that’s some of your credit gone already.
I don’t think Lisbon was that great a deal but on balance (and that’s what politics is, taking things in the round, compromising, the messy grey of the grown-up world) it was something we could live with.
No matter how comical or ridiculous their posturing – and whether it’s the recent Lisbon campaign in the Republic or their approach to government in Northern Ireland examples abound of Sinn Fein posturing that would be both comical and ridiculous if the consequences weren’t invariably so destructive – the Sinn Fein political philosophy harbours an atavistic appeal for the rest of us.
A parochial and insular approach is the most defining characteristic of politics on this island of which Sinn Fein and their Unionist opponents are the finest examples, followed closely in the Republic by Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour. (Labour have always had pretensions towards internationalism but they’re more a rhetorical Mighty Mouse when it comes to international issues and decidedly populist Minnie Mouse in domestic affairs).I think it’s fair to say that British politics are, and always have been, instinctively just as parochial and insular as ours. Maybe it’s something to do with geography, island ‘nations’, whatever, that inbreeds such a peculiar political mentality?
Yesterday, for example, I listened to Ruairi Quinn on Radio One talking about Ireland’s place in Europe; typically and narrowly watered down by Quinn to a matter of ‘influence’. Thus he recited the names of the public servants of Irish nationality who have made it to the top of the Brussels bureaucracy and even mentioned Pat Cox’s stint as President of the European Parliament as examples of Ireland’s ‘influence’ in Europe, punching above our weight etc. and a litany of other cliches. God spare us! And these people wonder why they lost the campaign on the Lisbon Treaty? Is there another island further out west in the Atlantic to which they might be temporarily exiled for the duration of the next Lisbon campaign?
In the government sponsored post-Lisbon survey, a significant proportion of respondents said they voted ‘no’ to Lisbon because they didn’t understand what the treaty was about. Well that excuse is hard to accept: if you’re asked to make a decision on something, even if it’s buying a cooker for your kitchen, then the first thing you do is make it your business to find out how it works. As Tomaltach points out, Lisbon is a banal Treaty, whose key provisions involve administrative changes to make the EU work better. Whatever people may have said to pollsters about lack of understanding of the proviions of the Treaty as a motivation for rejecting it, the reality is that we – encouraged in one way or another by our political masters and successive governments – look to Europe for passage onto the gravy train; for what we can get out of it and nothing more. We’re really not all that interested in Europe and, perhaps inevitably, neither are the most of those whom we elect as our public representatives.
Moreover,and entirely reasonably in my view, people are fed up with one Treaty arriving on the heels of another, yet each one presented as respresenting the critical roadmap for Europe’s long term future. Most of all, I think people have no idea anymore what Europe is for, how it works or where it is going; but they have a gut instinct that they don’t really like the direction all that much. Add strong, well organised and well-financed activists like Sinn Fein and Libertas to the mix and it all adds up to a thumping rejection of Lisbon.
On Dan’s point about the commissionership, do we have to wait for another treaty for the EU to decide that all countries will retain a commissioner? The Lisbon Treaty contains a provision, as I understand it, that will allow the Council to make that decision, once Lisbon has been ratified by all member states. Under the provisions of Nice, the number of Commissioners must be reduced once the Union has grown to 27 member states as it has now. But there’s flexibility for a political decision to retain a one per member state commission representation under Lisbon. One presumes that this will be a carrot offered to the electorate for the second referendum – Vote yes, and you get to keep your commissioner!
Simon. “Nice had very very little with ” the unsustainable economy”. that was probably mainly came from the Euro Zone low interest rates.”
Why is that the French and the Germans are not in the same dire straits that we are in?
Veronica, “Well that excuse is hard to accept: if you’re asked to make a decision on something, even if it’s buying a cooker for your kitchen, then the first thing you do is make it your business to find out how it works”
Thing is when it came to the treaty, the question people asked and which wasn’t adequately answered was “why are we buying a cooker?”, it was that context of why were we voting at all that was missing. As you said it is one treaty after another, all of them ‘crucial’ and ‘critical’.
As for the commissioner, yes Nice lost us the automatic right to a commissioner and provided for the reduction in the commission. Lisbon does allow for that to revisited, though I think the intention wasn’t to have more commissioners but perhaps even less. What they would pitch for Lisbon II is that you vote for Lisbon and we get to keep our commissioner but that the whole commissioner (EU Senate, yeah!) business would be revisited more extensively in the next Treaty. Fact is it needs to be.
EddieL, In Germany there is a different culture of home ownership – people rent rather than own their own homes. For example German law does not permit landlords to evict tenants unless they can demonstrate that they require the property to live in themselves. tenancies are therefore stable and secure and there isn’t the same incentive towards home ownership.
So unlike Ireland and Britain, there was no great property ‘boom’ in Germany in recent years. Our property boom was latterly financed by the euro zone interest rates and availablity of cheap loans, as correctly stated by Simon, and that and the action of home grown property speculators is an explanation as to why the boom became a bubble. The exchequer was overly dependant on receipts from property taxes, so when the international credit lines dried up we got hit with the double whammy of an exchequer running rapidly into a massive deficit and a collapse of the property market. A problem unique to our banks is that they advanced huge loans to developers for the purchase of sites that it now turns out are worth significantly less than when they were purchased. because they’re not telling us, we still don’t know just how badly exposed the banks are.
Germany is being hit by the global downturn in a different way through a fall off in economic production – it is estimated that unemployment in Germany will rise by 700,000 in the year ahead. The Chancellor, Angela Merckel, has apparently set her face against a stimulus package such as is being attempted in France and the UK and her current approach is subject to a lot of political criticism domestically.
The bottom line is that no country is escaping this crisis; it’s a matter of variations on a theme depending on the structure of your particular economy.
Dan, I agree with both your points although on the Commissionership I think the Irish Government will try and keep quiet about the bit about the issue being revisited in any further treaty. Otherwise, it would look like: “Oh look at us, aren’t we great? We secured the Irish commissionership but just for now.”! The no campaign, I guess, would make hay with that one.
Dan, about the one treaty following on the heels of another, each being more critical than the last. Partly this has been a problem born of the peculiar nature of the EU itself. The EU evolved over time without any central authority to shape its architecture. There was no equivalent of the Philadelphia Convention where the US constitution was drafted and where the founding fathers constructed a solid architectural edifice with would support the nation for centuries. The EU treaty of Rome was full of aspiration (“ever closer union”) but in reality it was a far more modest affair (though given the context of the time it was remarkable enough). And since then the Union has evolved kind of haphazardly, building up on the original foundations – usually with hideous compromises. The political dimension grew over time, and since there was no big moment, it was a whole lot of merely ‘significant’ advances. But in order for governments to convince peoples who are deeply wedded to the idea of the nation, hey had to convince them that each step was ‘crucial’. In one sense this approach has back fired. There should have been far earlier efforts to explain to electorates exactly what the proposed changes were about, even if it meant moving more slowly. But then again, given the fall of the Berlin wall, Europe wanted to move quickly so that it might embrace the central and Eastern countries before they drifted into other folds. In any case, there really is a lack of understanding about how Europe works. And plugging that gap will not be easy. In general our media are not all that interested – only when a political storm blows up do they indulge it. I know people who work in the commission and parliament offices in Dublin, and they say that, apart from big ticket stories, nothing that the EU does is picked up by the national media. The tabloids in particular, simply ignore it. It is just really difficult to reach people. In the end, the Eu institutions are seen as remote and irrelevant. This allows the situation to develop where say the EU parliament passes a piece of legislation which would for example improve food safety, but no one notices. Then 6 months later it is being transposed into national law in Dáil Éireann and our minister for food will claim the credit instead of saying, hey, this is a significant new EU initiative.
As far as I can see there hasn’t been any way found yet to fix this communication problem.
Veronica: It is not only home ownership we went mad on (we always had a desire for home ownership). We went mad on second properties, properties abroad, SUVs, helicopters etc. Against this we went mad on cheap imported consumer goods. We even went mad on cheap imported labour. We believed the rumours that we were the world’s richest people.
Yet our few native industries have been collapsing. We now have an elite who do nothing but handle other people’s money, often printing their own salary cheques. We have a steady reduction in wages for those who do the real work (the minimum wage is now regarded as an objective for all workers).
It is also reported that we have 5 times the retail space compared to England, who were called a “nation of shop-keepers”, with the consequent number of workers. So if you want to see the cause of our problems look no further than the production sector or the lack of it, the bloated financial services sector and the retail services sector.
Sinn Féin, irredeemable purists? I don’t think so. I think Sinn Féin is, to borrow a phrase, Fianna Fáil for slow learners. The ‘republican’ party is merely piggybacking on opposition to Lisbon in an effort to boost its own position vis a vis the southern electorate. IE the party believes the coming debate about Lisbon will see SF spokespeople getting equal airtime with the Yes Parties. That’s advantageous in an election year with SF people standing for European and Local Elections.
There is only one imperative in Sinn Féin – and that’s to achieve power. Once in power, however, the party has squandered its authority in some sort of arrangement with the DUP which leads SF, for instance, which is a continuation of their war by other means. The Irish language is used in this war by SF to galvanise its supporters against the DUP – which has control of the culture ministry – but any SF supporter should take a moment and look at what the party is doing itself to promote the Irish language. This week, for instance, on 19 December, the Irish language daily newspaper, Lá Nua, will close down as a result of having its funding pulled by Foras na Gaeilge. Sinn Féin has four members on the 16 strong board – and earlier this year Lá Nua criticised trenchantly the party for its failure to protect, among other things, the Irish language broadcast fund in the north from the DUP’s attentions. The Sinn Féin members all voted against Lá Nua being offered funding to continue beyond December 2008…..
Yet the party then came out to issue statements decrying the closure of Lá Nua….as if anyone would ever believe them again….
Lisbon is a means to an end not an end in itself. SF would gladly implement Lisbon in office – but at the moment it’s nothing more than a bandwagon.
The pity is, from SF”s point of view, is that Libertas and Declan Ganley are the main antagonists in the public mind re Lisbon and SF is very much the poor relation….
Interesting comment. But then ALL the main political parties in the Republic used the previous Lisbon referendum to promote their prospective MEP candidates and local authority candidates. Some were more blatant than others, notably the Labour Party’s postering campaign, which was much commented on at the time. This level of cynicism turned people off. Why should anyone be persuaded to vote ‘yes’ to a Treaty that party leaders were so intent on using for their own petty party political ends?
And already, we’d best get used to more of it. According to the Irish Times report, Labour’s Joe Costello told a public meeting organised by the European Commission office in Dublin this morning that Labour may not support a Yes voet in the second referendum on Lisbon if guarantees on workers’ rights and social issues are not satisfactory.
So, the Labour Party that advocated a Yes vote in the first referendum because they beleived the Treaty was in Ireland’s best interests, will campaign for a ‘No’ vote in a second referendum on the exact same Treaty if it doesn’t receive guarantees on workers’ rights that weren’t an issue for Labour the first time around? When it comes to political posturing and cynicism, Sinn Fein are only trotting after these boys.