OPINION/Fintan O'TooleThere are two very good reasons for voting No to Nice. One is that it would deliver a good kicking to an awful Government. The other is that my colleague,John Waters, has promised to eat a copy of The Irish Times on O'Connell Bridge in the event of a No vote, a spectacle that would add a little gaiety to these dreary days. And, er, that's it.
Much of what has passed for debate from either side of the argument is neither here nor there.
The scare tactic of the Yes side - vote for Nice or the multinational corporations won't like us any more - doesn't bear much scrutiny. Multinational corporations like to make money and, so long as profits are in prospect, they will stay.
Low rates of corporation tax matter a great deal more to foreign direct investment than our views on the precise weighting of qualified majority voting on the issue of subsidies to olive-oil producers in Sardinia. It is a safe bet that the eyes of corporate CEOs glaze over when these issues are being discussed just as quickly as the eyes of all but the tiny group of Irish Euro-anorak cultists.
Equally, the concern about the role of small states in the new EU institutional arrangements with which No campaigners have bored the nation to tears is hard to fathom. The simple reality of enlargement from an Irish point of view is that it will bring in more little nations. Apart from Luxembourg, we are at the moment the smallest state in the EU. But six of the applicant countries have smaller populations than Ireland. Anyone wanting to protect the rights of the less populous nations will thus have a far bigger pool of natural allies.
For me, the real question is about Ireland's place in the world, and especially about Irish neutrality. I have a natural affinity with groups like Afri which oppose the arms trade, support the UN and abhor militarism. I have read very carefully all of their arguments about why Nice should be opposed on these grounds.
If I thought Nice was pushing Ireland into the arms of NATO, I would vote against it, whatever the consequences. The problem is I've read and heard nothing that convinces me that this is so.
My first concern is with two huge absences in the argument against Nice. There is no acknowledgement that the EU is the greatest peace-making enterprise in human history and that its expansion into central and eastern Europe is a momentous re-engagement with that historic mission.
In the mind-numbing boredom of Euro-speak, it is all too easy to lose sight of the big picture: the freeing of a continent from the tragic mess that produced two World Wars, the concentration camps and the gulags, and more deaths than in all the wars in all of previous human history put together.
The other glaring absence is an acknowledgement that we have watched, in the last few years and in the heart of our continent, a horrific resurgence of Europe's astonishing capacity for violent depravity: large-scale massacres, systematic gang rape, concentration camps, attempted genocide.
And watched is precisely the word. The Srebrenica massacre, for example, unfolded before our eyes in slow motion, on prime time. We Europeans let it happen, through a combination of political impotence, diplomatic cynicism, institutional incapacity and a bad habit of waiting for the US to tell us how to behave.
We in Ireland have moral and legal obligations in the face of this reality. We are, for example, signatories of the Genocide Convention under which we accepted the duty to prevent the mass extermination of any group of people. Since we can't fulfil those obligations on our own, we have to do so in co-operation with our neighbours and friends in the EU.
The Nice Treaty does not create a European army. It does not even create the Rapid Reaction Force which is intended to give the EU the capacity to engage in the kind of intervention that the Bosnian massacres demanded. The RRF is a product of previous treaties which were, it should be noted by those who complain about the re-running of Nice, endorsed in referendums by the Irish people.
In the fine print of their arguments, the anti-Nice campaigners accept this. Anthony Coughlan's National Platform talks of the Rapid Reaction Force as something that is "already agreed" and in whose current structures "Irish military officers serve daily".
Coughlan also agrees that the RRF is not an army: "The Rapid Reaction Force is not a permanent standing EU army, but a pool of national forces to which Ireland has committed 850 soldiers."
Are there those in the EU who want to push onwards from Nice and create a European army and a European mutual defence pact? Damn right there are. That is the real battle and it will be engaged in the next two years. However, to vote against Nice because of the Rapid Reaction Force is not to put a halt to that process but to fatally weaken Ireland's arguments against it.
To argue against the militarisation of the EU without arguing for an effective European capacity to defend human rights, by military means if necessary, is to be not pacific but simply passive. If we stand on the sidelines while epic historic challenges are being met, who is going to listen to our grand visions for a better world?