The Amsterdam Treaty was another step in the process of building a federal European state and is being pushed by elite groups without proper public discussion, a leading anti-treaty activist claimed yesterday.
Mr Anthony Coughlan, secretary of the National Platform, told a press conference in Dublin that people should oppose "this fundamental erosion of our national democracy". If people had not had time to read the information on Amsterdam published by the Referendum Commission, then they should vote No, he said.
Mr Coughlan said successive European treaties had amounted to a "constitutional revolution" whereby more and more powers were handed to the EU by stealth. Ireland, a sovereign independent democratic State, was being transformed "into a constituent element of a federal EU".
This change was of such far-reaching significance "it should be considered openly and honestly on its merits". That had not happened in this campaign. The Amsterdam Treaty was another step in that process, but "I think people don't realise the way in which the EU is moving towards becoming a centralised state", said Mr Coughlan.
"The European single currency is the booster rocket for the EU state now in the making, in which the Irish Republic becomes more like a region or province than an independent State of its own. The Amsterdam Treaty gives the new Union state a kind of confused constitution.
"The treaty gives the European Union legal personality and a corporate existence for the first time, separate from that of its member-states," he said. "That is a major constitutional change.
"It declares the superiority of European law over national law for the first time in a European treaty. It gives the EU power to decide our human rights, to lay down new ones and decide the limits to old ones. It opens the way to the gradual imposition of a harmonised value system across the EU, whose only justification is that such harmonisation would further the objective of the EU state-building project.
"It gives the Union power to harmonise large areas of our criminal and civil law, power to subject us to majority voting in significant foreign policy matters and ties the EU closer to the Western European Union military alliance."
While paying tribute to the work of the Referendum Commission in running its information campaign, he called on those "who have not enough time to consider the arguments" to vote No on the basis that "you shouldn't sign up to something you don't know about".
According to Ms Carol Fox of the Peace and Neutrality Alliance, the treaty would bolster nuclear alliances such as NATO and the WEU. A common defence policy might not happen immediately after ratification "but it commits the member-states to a progressive framing of a common defence policy".
The problem with this, she said, was that Ireland was therefore committed to framing a common defence policy "with two nuclear groupings". The extension of Qualified Majority Voting would further compromise Irish foreign policy, she maintained.
The former British Labour Party MP, Mr Nigel Spearing, said the treaty "forces people into a closer union than ever before". Mr Spearing also expressed strong opposition to the European single currency.