Patrick Kinsella (no relation) writes on the Treaty in today’s Irish Times as the Taoiseach assures us the Treaty text won’t change. From Kinsella’s piece:
The Government is rigorously following the policies required by the troika of intergovernment lenders who support our current spending deficit and our bank rescue, and voting No will not change that. But the political situation in Europe is changing radically, and it is absurd to think that our partners will leave us high and dry for future loans because we reject a legal straitjacket on future policy demanded in the dying days of the Merkel regime. And don’t think the ideological rebalancing demanded by the fiscal treaty is limited to the euro zone members: the final article says “steps will be taken” to incorporate the substance of it “into the legal framework of the European Union”.
The political context for the social market economy in the 1950s and 1960s was the spectre of communism that haunted Europe. The context now includes the indignados of Spain, riots in Greece, and right-wing parties. Those of us with no great wealth other than our education worry for our children: where will they work, how will they live?
On this issue, the Labour Party in Government has abandoned its traditional constituency, signing up to support the banks at the expense of equality, jobs and fair working conditions. It has abandoned the social pillar of the European Union in the interests of an illusory “stability”. I sense that its traditional constituency will abandon Labour at the next election.
In the meantime, those of us who think that on balance the European Union has been good for Ireland, and do not want to see that balance overturned, have compelling reasons to vote No to this treaty.