Madam, - Harry McGee of your political staff says that Mr Declan Ganley, chairman of the right-wing group, Libertas, "has found himself as the de factofigurehead of the campaign against the Treaty of Lisbon". (Weekend Review, January 12th). Mr Ganley is no such thing.
The Irish Timesseems anxious to tar those who will campaign against this latest EU Treaty with a right-wing brush. On two recent occasions, on a flimsy pretext, your correspondents have suggested the possibility that the politically repulsive Jean Marie Le Pen, leader of the French National Front, might come here to "assist the No campaign". In fact his presence would be a major hindrance.
One of Mr Ganley's problems with the Lisbon Treaty is that it does not give enough latitude to business corporations to engage in cut-throat competition in the ruthless pursuit of private profit. As if it weren't enough that they have initiated the "race to the bottom" - the use of vulnerable migrant and other low-paid workers to undercut established wage levels and conditions - together with the push for privatisation of public services and attacks on workers' pension rights.
It is rather rich for Mr Ganley to pose as a defender of democracy in Europe. He enriched himself from speculation in public assets privatised by the corrupt bureaucracies which previously controlled the Soviet Union and satellite states as personal fiefdoms.
He was involved in the notorious "privatisation vouchers" scheme in Albania which later caused an economic and social collapse. The level of Mr Ganley's concern for the proper planning and development of resources in the interests of the ordinary people of Albania can be deducted from the fact that he appointed the late Mr Liam Lawlor as an advisor to his privatisation projects.
Mr Ganley's business dealings in Eastern Europe mirror those of the infamous Russian oligarchs who became obscenely rich in a short time by seizing private control of social assets that properly belonged to the Russian people, very many of whom were left in abject poverty by the privatisation process.
Privatisation and militarisation are further advanced within the EU by the proposals in the Lisbon Treaty. The Socialist Party will be advocating that working people in Ireland reject it. We will be campaigning both independently and in cooperation with other genuine opponents of neo-liberalism and capitalist globalisation, and certainly not as part of groupings which stand for an even more right-wing agenda than that already enshrined in the European Unoion.
- Yours, etc,
JOE HIGGINS, (Socialist Party) Briarwood Close, Dublin 15.
Madam, - The debates and referendums on EU entry by Latvia and nine other successful recent EU applicant states can hardly be construed as approval of the Lisbon Treaty, as claimed by Dr Martin Mansergh (January 15th). The real problem with this treaty was well expressed by Paul Gillespie (World View, October 6th, 2007) as "the radical retreat from public engagement back to diplomatic intergovernmentalism".
Your own columnist accurately described parliamentary ratification by all other member-states bar Ireland as a "politics of disguise, a retreat from clarity and transparency towards legal complexity and secret diplomacy".
Faced with such blatant secrecy, no wonder people were "bewildered by the growing complexity and opacity of decision-making".
How can we in Ireland do anything other than register a polite but firm No in the coming referendum?
- Yours, etc,
ROBERT POCOCK, Royal Terrace West, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.