Martin stresses cost of rejecting treaty

LISBON TREATY:IF IRELAND rejects the Lisbon treaty in the next referendum, it would "cast a fundamental shadow of doubt over our commitment to the European Union", Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin told the ardfheis.

Opening a special debate on Ireland and Europe, Mr Martin said the No vote last year had “enormous implications” and created serious, deep and “damaging doubts” about the perception of Ireland’s role in the EU.

He warned another No “would put us into genuinely uncharted waters at a time of severe and worldwide economic turbulence”, and opponents of Lisbon risk “driving us into a cul-de-sac”.

Approving the treaty with its binding legal guarantees “will allow us to remove any doubt about our position at the heart of the European Union.

“Be in no doubt. That decision is vital for the wellbeing of our economy and for our nation’s future.”

He said that keeping a European commissioner is a “real concession” and a “significant change to the Lisbon package we voted on in June.

“We will not be going back to the people with the same package. It will be different”.

Hitting out at what he called a “fundamental dishonesty” in the debate on Lisbon, he said “what I’m talking about is the claim to be pro-EU made by public figures who bitterly oppose the Lisbon treaty”.

It was a deception that needed “to be done away with. Because nobody who is pro-EU would deliberately raise unjustified fears about a Union grounded in the yearning for peace and committed to growth, diversity and prosperity”.

Those “who insist that ‘no means no’ whatever the circumstances are really trying to put a distance between Ireland and our EU partners”.

He told delegates in Citywest Hotel, Saggart, Dublin, that “we have decisions to make that are as important as any decision we’ve made in the past”.

Prof Bridget Laffan of UCD said that the next referendum “is about Ireland’s relationship with Europe and whether we’re in or out, and it’s as stark as that”.

She said that at the last referendum “if you’d landed from Mars you would have thought Joe Higgins was taoiseach of the country”. She referred to the “access to primary radio and TV that was given to people who were essentially either non-representative or weakly representative”.

She also said the extent of the domination of the British press in Irish media was extremely serious, and its “real core Euroscepticism”. Access to the facts should not be “driven by media influence from another jurisdiction” Prof Laffan added.

Minister of State for Europe Dick Roche said it would be the “ultimate irony if a British Euro-sceptic rag could come into this country and skew a public decision”.

Associate Prof Richard Sinnott of UCD said research had shown that “the more people know about the EU the more they support it”. He told delegates that “treaties are complex but the issues can be explained in simple terms” and the campaign would be a “process of persuading people and reassuring them”.