Richard Green writes in The Irish Times: “We can’t afford Lisbon”

July 30, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

www.coircampaign.org

Last week you may have received a missive from the Department of Foreign Affairs. A cute-looking postcard, it was paid for by your taxes and contained a serious plug for the Lisbon Treaty.
This sort of political propaganda should be illegal, since the 1995 McKenna judgment forbids government spending public money directly to achieve a particular result in a referendum, but, as we know, this government has been known to bend the rules before, so perhaps we should expect more of the same in the coming months.

The postcard is written to persuade No to Lisbon voters that the treaty is changed utterly. The tone is meant to be reassuring, and in its very first paragraph the Department makes a statement that brazenly dresses up a political promise as a legal certainty.

It states that “when the Irish people vote on the Lisbon Treaty later this year, it will come with additional legal guarantees and assurances to address their main concerns.” This is not the case, and the selling of the assurances obtained by the government as legal guarantees which change the Lisbon Treaty, is not only dishonest, but in this instance uses taxpayer funds to fool the taxpayer.

This Lisbon Treaty will remain unchanged by any assurances obtained by the Irish government on any issue. Not a word or a comma will be altered. It is exactly the same treaty rejected last June by the Irish people.

Neither are these “guarantees” legally binding on the European Union – something the government understands better than most, despite their insistence that lodging the assurances with the United Nations gives them some legal standing.

This fatuous notion caused journalist Vincent Browne to remark that they might as well be lodged with Leitrim County Council.

That’s no disrespect to Leitrim County Council, it’s just that the United Nations has no jurisdiction to enforce EU guarantees – and the European Court of Justice does not have to consider any other law besides EU law. These guarantees are not part of any EU treaty (including the Lisbon Treaty), so cannot be considered EU law. Read full article…