Ireland not serving citizens on Lisbon, says Ganley
ANDREW WILLIS IN DUBLIN AND VALENTINA POP IN STRASBOURG
Today @ 09:24 CET
EUOBSERVER / DUBLIN / STRASBOURG

Asked why a second referendum in Ireland is required when this was not the case in France and the Netherlands after they rejected the Constitutional Treaty, Mr Leinen said: “The situation is different now than in June 2005, when there were two Nos in one week and seven more countries set to hold referendums.”

“But when all the countries say ‘Yes’, it’s legitimate to ask [the Irish] if that’s their last answer,” he argued at a press conference in Strasbourg.

“A second No would be a No, and then of course you could forget about the treaty. But a first No is volatile, let’s say, because it’s not a clear No against Europe. Here you have a diffuse coalition of Nos. We respect it, but we have to respect as well the Yes of the other member states,” Mr Leinen concluded.

We might as well add MEP Roger Helmer’s (UK) opinion from his last electronic newsletter:

Deceit and contempt: drafting the Lisbon Treaty

When our government was trying to convince us of the benefits of the Lisbon Treaty, we were told that it contained an “Early Warning Mechanism” that increased the powers of national parliaments to resist EU legislation, and that this meant devolving greater power to member-states and increasing the accountability of the EU institutions.

But now two prominent Europhile MEPs, Labour’s Richard Corbett and the Lib-Dems’ Andrew Duff, have admitted that it did no such thing. In evidence to the Commons European Scrutiny Committee, Andrew Duff told the Committee: “there is a danger that, in assessing the Treaty of Lisbon, national parliaments become obsessed by the early warning mechanism on subsidiarity. It was understood by those of us involved in its drafting and then re-drafting, that the mechanism, although a necessary addition to the system of governance of the Union, was not really intended to be used. It is, in Bagehot’s terms, more a dignified part of the European constitutional settlement than an efficient one.” Richard Corbett told the Committee: “in practice, I do not think that the ‘yellow’ and ‘orange’ card mechanisms will be extensively used.”

The deceit is breath-taking. The contempt in which they hold the voters, and their national parliaments, is astonishing. But we need to learn the lesson: everything the EU does is about transferring power from us to them, and when they pretend otherwise, they’re lying.

Tomorrow Sweden!