Madam, - Part of the problem with Dr Anthony Coughlan (November 11th) is that he and his colleagues in the National Platform are largely indifferent to what actually happened in Europe since 1848. In that year, the Year of Revolutions, nationalists all over Europe proclaimed a vision of a Europe which would be a constellation of independent (sic) nation-states, cohabiting happily together, and mutually respecting their diverse national interests. Sadly, it took three major European wars and tens of millions of unnecessary deaths before a critical mass of people in even a few European countries concluded that there had to be a better way of running a sub-continent - and, eventually, a planet. The 1848 vision just did not work. It had failed in its its most basic task: the protection and vindication of the right of nations to exist.
Many of your readers, perhaps including Dr Coughlan, regard mulling over the ancient wars of the 20th century as boring and irrelevant. So I will not rehearse what actually happened to almost all the nation-states of 1919 in 1936-1941 - and again, in some cases, in 1948-1950. Unfortunately, in 2004, the phenomenon of war itself is neither ancient, boring nor irrelevant.
Despite our best efforts to airbrush it quickly out of our memories, there was a particularly nasty little war in Europe in the last decade when a quarter-of-a-million former Yugoslavs lost their lives in localities not unfamiliar to Irish tourists and pilgrims.
There is another war in progress at the moment in Iraq which is no longer just a regional skirmish but is the focus of global attention and emotional engagement.
Even we Irish, despite our protestations of post-colonial purity, now run the danger that inexorably we too will be sucked into it and its fall-out.
On the most basic bread-and-butter level, it has been clear for 40 years or more that the real decisions about how we live are not made on this island. One tiny state with four million people cannot protect and vindicate its vital national interests by itself. It can only do so in conjunction with others which are prepared to commit to a common strategy and its practical implementation - and are willing to accept a common set of rules.
A federation (and we all need to stop playing games with this word) is by definition a polity or community based upon a treaty. This European Constitutional Treaty, unlike its predecessors, was drafted in the open, not in a "headlong rush" (Dr Coughlan), but over a period of years, by mandated representatives of the peoples of the "old" Fifteen and the "new" Ten. Indeed, it has actually taken over half-a-century to get even as far as this.
At a moment in world history when that history is being accelerated in a deeply worrying direction by forces which are utterly uninterested in the rights of small nations, it behoves Dr Coughlan and his colleagues to come up with a practical alternative to the European project. - Yours etc.,
MAURICE O'CONNELL, Oakpark, Tralee, Co Kerry.