Former PD leader calls for Yes vote

SOLICITORS FOR LISBON:FORMER TÁNAISTE and Progressive Democrats leader Michael McDowell has called for a Yes vote in the Lisbon Treaty referendum.

Mr McDowell stressed that the treaty will not create an EU superstate or an irreversible slide into such a state.

In his first political foray since the 2007 general election, he said the debate on Europe needed to be nuanced and not a “phony Punch and Judy” between the extremes – the federalists at one end and those who have always rejected Ireland’s membership of the EU.

“There is nobody to represent the great majority of people” in the centre, and political debate had not kept up, he said.

The former minister for justice declined to say, despite repeated questions, whether or not he was returning to political life. “I’m not talking about my future and I came here in a personal capacity to talk about Europe”. He was seeking “a real debate on Europe , and not a debate on other issues which are of far less interest to the Irish people”.

Addressing a “Solicitors for Lisbon” meeting in the Shelbourne Hotel, Mr McDowell, a senior counsel, said the debate on Lisbon had been ill-served because it had been dominated by extremes of opinion to the exclusion of the great majority “in the centre”.

Mr McDowell said he did not come to the issue “either as a Eurofederalist or as a Eurosceptic, but as a Eurorealist”, and added: “I need reassurance that by casting a Yes vote, I am not simply signing a political cheque for the creation of a federal European superstate against my wishes.”

He had done a detailed analysis of the decisions of the Czech and German constitutional courts, which looked at the compatibility of the Lisbon Treaty with their constitutions. This was unlike Ireland where membership of the EU “explicitly makes European law superior to Irish law”.

Based on this analysis, he rejected claims that the treaty started an irreversible process of creating a federal superstate and said EU member states would remain “masters of the treaty”.

Pointing out that the EU had powers “lent by the sovereign members state”, he said that the member states and not the EU itself retained the “last say” as to the future of the EU. Every member state was free to withdraw from the EU even against the wishes of other members, which confirmed that the EU could not be a federal superstate.

Stressing the need for a more nuanced debate, he said “in the centre of Irish society there are a huge number of Irish people who look at Europe and are concerned about it, are enthusiastic about it in many respects and they want people to articulate their concerns” but not in a “Punch and Judy show”.

He insisted his decision to speak out two weeks before the October 2nd vote “is absolutely not a criticism of the Government’s handling of the referendum debate. It’s a difficult thing to sell.” He noted “how dense and unattractive some of that stuff is”.

He believed in the electorate’s right to a referendum, he said. One of the things that “inspired” him to speak out on the issue “was the suggestion that somehow that right of the Irish citizen was being thrown away and I thought that had to be countered”.

David Geary of Solicitors for Europe, which organised the event, described the referendum debate as “one of the most important for a generation”. The organisation has some 200 members across the country, he said.