Themselves Alone

One of our mandates here at BoBW is to alert our Irish readers when some seemingly domestic matter attracts international attention. Therefore, while we normally don't have much use for the National Review Online, we note with relative approval the following item on Friday:

TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY [Andrew Stuttaford]

The Irish people once gave the EU Commission the ‘wrong’ result in a referendum. Such errors cannot be allowed to happen again:

[excerpt] The Irish government is considering amending the national constitution to allow for major future changes to EU rules to be made without a referendum, according to a report in The Irish Times on Friday.[end excerpt]

Indeed. It's consistent with the NRO's Euroscepticism to play this up as a Brussels machination and it's a fair point that the whole EU project often seems driven by a political-administrative elite that would be quite happy to ignore the public as long as they keep the taxes coming to finance the multilingual snouts at the trough.

But in this case, the instinct to limit Irish popular oversight of future EU decision-making springs at least as much from Dublin as from Brussels.* Because the Republic's natural party of government quite reasonably finds all that accountability and responsibility stuff rather annoying and would prefer a Bertie-knows-best model of decision-making.

Symptomatic of this is that on the same day that the government revealed the ambitious scope of its plans for ratifying future EU decision-making, and thus attracting the above attention, they were also ramming an amendment to the British-Irish agreement through the Dail. Their overall incompetence means that they spend a quite a bit of time passing emergency legislation to fix past f**k-ups -- and they speed up the process with guillotines on parliamentary debate.

The Opposition is not happy and Labour leader Pat Rabbitte had some numbers:

"It may come as a surprise to the House that since the foundation of the Irish Republic in 1919, the guillotine has been used 575 times. But since the current combination of parties [Fianna Fail and Progressive (sic) Democrats (sic)] assumed office in 1997, it has been used 191 times, 33 per cent of the total number," said Mr Rabbitte.

And this is not because of any US Senate style filibusters, it's simply a truncation of the normal process of passing legislation -- the rushed job perhaps contributing to further mistakes that get mended in the same manner sometime later. You'd think that self-styled Irish Republicans would have at least a little shame about the guillotine, since as we explained a while ago, it was brought in to curb the effective parliamentary tactics of Irish nationalists in the House of Commons. The deeper problem is that, unlike our neighbours north of the border, voting patterns in the Republic have yet to show enough a realignment to change the people in charge.

*UPDATE 11 MAY: In the interest of pursuing the above thread, we should note that the government has since dropped the proposal that the EU Constitution referendum would have been a "super-referendum" obviating the need for any further ones. Monday's Irish Times (subs. req'd):

The Government now plans to rewrite its proposed wording for the EU treaty referendum to exclude a clause that would give the State power to sign up to a wide range of EU policy changes without referendum ... [Labour leader Pat Rabbitte] said this change, known is EU jargon as a passerelle provision, was not required by the European constitution and "would give rise to the perception, at least, that major changes to the European constitution could in future be made without any reference to the people".

In a note on the matter yesterday, the Government said it believed this provision was reasonable, and did not allow for any extension of the EU's competence or power. "However, the Government is sensitive to the political argument that the scope of the procedure might be exaggerated in a referendum campaign, and is now tending to the view that arrangements for ratification, even of such limited treaty change, should remain as at present - namely a decision would be taken on a case-by-case basis as to whether a referendum would be necessary."