The Joint Committee met at 2 p.m. MEMBERS PRESENT: Deputy Barry Andrews,  | Senator Paschal Donohoe, | | Deputy Joe Costello, | Senator John Hanafin, | | Deputy Lucinda Creighton, | Senator Terry Leyden, | | Deputy Timmy Dooley, | Senator Phil Prendergast, | | Deputy Michael McGrath, | Senator Feargal Quinn. | | Deputy Michael Mulcahy, | | | Deputy Mary O’Rourke, | | | | |
DEPUTY BERNARD J. DURKAN IN THE CHAIR.  Business of Joint Committee.
Chairman: We have a quorum. I have received apologies from Deputy Breen. Deputy Michael McGrath: Will the Chairman arrange for a list to be circulated to members detailing the groups that have appeared before the committee to date to discuss the Lisbon treaty and their position thereon? I attended a meeting of the National Forum on Europe in Cork last night where a useful public debate took place. It would be helpful for members of the committee to be able to state at such fora that a particular group has attended a meeting of this committee and to indicate the position it has taken on the treaty. Chairman: There is some difficulty in that we may have to wait before we commit ourselves in that regard. Deputy Michael McGrath: Can such a list be circulated internally? Chairman: Yes, that is no problem. Deputy Mary O’Rourke: I have a question about the correspondence we received from Sinn Féin. Chairman: Yes, the party asked that it be circulated to all members. Deputy Mary O’Rourke: Does the Chairman wish to discuss that? Chairman: We will come to it in due course. Sinn Féin asked that it be distributed to all members for their information. Members will have an opportunity to discuss it if they so wish. Lisbon Treaty: Discussion. Chairman: I welcome Mr. Kieran Allen, joint editor of the website, VoteNo.ie; Mr. Roger Cole, chairman of the Peace and Neutrality Alliance; and Ms Patricia McKenna, a patron of the People’s Movement. We also invited Mr. Declan Ganley from Libertas but that invitation was declined. I remind delegates that while members of the committee have full privilege, witnesses appearing before the committee do not enjoy the same privilege. Members are reminded of the parliamentary practice that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against any person outside the House or an official by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable. The normal procedure is that each group makes a presentation of five or ten minutes’ duration followed by questions and answers. We hope to complete the meeting within two hours. The purpose of this exercise is to obtain information that will be of benefit to the public in the course of its assessment of the issues before it in the forthcoming referendum on the Lisbon treaty. Representatives of the social partners have already attended meetings of the committee. Some confirmed their support for the treaty, some indicated that they are considering the issues, and others signalled a desire to hear more about the issues so as to be in a better position to lead their members in a particular direction. Meetings of this committee will take place at locations throughout the State at which the same format will prevail. We plan to produce a report at the end of this process. On the basis of the information submitted in the course of these hearings, the committee will come to its own opinion on the treaty and set it out in this report. I call Mr. Kieran Allen, joint editor of the website, VoteNo.ie, to make his submission. Ms Patricia McKenna: Before we begin, I wish to speak on behalf of all three delegates. Members are undoubtedly aware of the conditions set down under the McKenna judgment on the use of public funds. We are aware that the committee has been asked about the format of the forthcoming public meetings. We have some concerns in this regard. For example, what are the Standing Orders, who will be invited, will there be a designated “Yes” and “No” speaker, and will the public and those on the “No” side enjoy equal participation with the committee itself? It is our understanding that all the members of the committee are on the “Yes” side, so this raises questions of balance. I am sure members will not abandon their own opinions while participating in these meetings and pretend they do not have a position. That would be virtually impossible to do. Will the Chairman explain how the meetings will be structured, how the public will be involved and how equal balance will be achieved between the “Yes” and “No” sides? What budget has been set aside for these meetings? It is a new departure for an Oireachtas committee to sit in locations throughout the State. I understand the rate is something like €800 for an overnight stay. Deputy Timmy Dooley: With respect, may I respond to that? Chairman: I will answer Ms McKenna. Ms Patricia McKenna: We simply want to know what the procedure will be. The Chairman stated at the outset that the committee wants to obtain information that will be of benefit to the public. However, the public is also interested in how public resources are spent. Chairman: The assumption that all of those who have made presentations to the committee to date advocate a “Yes” vote in the forthcoming referendum is incorrect. The committee has written to a number of well-known analysts to ask them to speak on one side or the other. One of the committee’s ideas was to have speakers from the “Yes” and “No” sides. Several of those we contacted have replied that they prefer to maintain an analytical position to analyse the treaty as it stands according to their own opinions than to take a position on the “Yes” or “No” side. Funding will be made available in due course in the ordinary way. I have referred briefly to the format of the meetings. This will not be the first time an Oireachtas committee has met outside of Leinster House. I was a member of the Committee of Public Accounts when it met outside of Leinster House. Provision was made, by means of an order of the House, for it to meet outside of Leinster House in the same way that provision is being made today for this committee to meet elsewhere on this occasion. The issues raised previously in respect of the protocol for the meetings have been discussed by the committee. The protocol may yet be amended by the committee. The public will be informed of any such amendments by means of public advertisement. All concerned will have ample opportunity to respond in any way they see fit. The existence of the McKenna judgment does not, in itself, affect the work of this joint committee, which consists of Members of Oireachtas Éireann. The committee’s mandate is derived from and is governed by the running of the Oireachtas. No attempt has been made at any time to exclude any speaker from making his or her case at a meeting of the committee. It is not likely that an attempt will be made to exclude any speaker during the public meetings and hearings which will take place. This committee of the Oireachtas has the right to come down on one side or the other having gone through the various processes, such as engaging in an examination of the submissions made. We are involved in such processes at present. Those who appear to have a positive or negative attitude to the treaty have been specifically asked by the members of the joint committee to qualify their positions at this forum. Many of them have done so. We have been advised that such an approach is in accordance with the McKenna and Kelly judgments and any other judgments. Ms Patricia McKenna: I would like to say one thing. Chairman: I do not propose to have a debate on this subject. Ms McKenna mentioned Ms Patricia McKenna: How will the meetings Chairman: The meetings will take the form of formal sittings of the committee pursuant to an order of the Houses of the Oireachtas and in accordance with Article 15.1.3° of the Constitution. The meetings will be conducted in accordance with the rules and procedures of the Houses of the Oireachtas relating to the sittings of committees. The sittings will be presided over by the Chairman of the joint committee. They will be organised and conducted to ensure objectivity, fairness and balance in the proceedings. Members of the public will be invited to attend and may speak at the meetings, subject to certain conditions. Each meeting will be opened by the Chairman who will address those present with an opening statement. Thereafter, the Chairman will invite two speakers to address the formal committee sittings one speaker in favour of the treaty and one speaker against it, the order having been decided in advance by lot. Each speaker may make a short opening statement of no more than ten or 15 minutes’ duration. Members of the audience who may wish to speak will be invited by the Chair to take the floor each will have up to three minutes’ speaking time. Prior to asking a question, each member of the audience shall mention his or her name, organisation and the area where he or she is from, for the purpose of reporting the proceedings. Members of the committee, by virtue of their election to the Oireachtas, have a mandate. The meetings proposed will take place through that mandate. The Chairman of the committee will invite the audience to ask questions of and make comments to the committee. Questions will be taken in rounds of three or four, at the discretion of the Chair. The Chairman will, at his discretion, call various members of the committee to respond to the questions asked. He may also, at his discretion, ask those purporting to advocate a “No” vote to reply to the audience queries. An equal opportunity will be provided by the Chair to enable each side to respond to questions and comments. If the 17 members of the committee take a certain view on a topic, a speaker on the other side of the debate will not get 17 opportunities to respond. It will not work that way. Speaking time will be organised in a manner that is proportionate to the size of the committee and reflective of the manner in which committee meetings are always conducted. I assure members that everybody will get fair play. Nobody will be excluded. Members of the committee and invited speakers who are nominated to respond will be invited to take the floor. Each of them will have up to three minutes in which to reply. I refer to the members of the committee. Ms Patricia McKenna: Sorry Chairman: Members of the committee, invited speakers and members of the audience may take the floor only when called upon to do so by the Chairman. The Chairman will have complete discretion in the running of the meetings. He will ensure the proper balance of the meetings and the maintenance of the decorum of the meetings, as provided for in the Standing Orders of the Oireachtas or otherwise. The Chairman may also restrict the repetition of questions or views as he or she sees fit. The proceedings of the sittings, including the contributions of the members of the public, are to be recorded. The purpose of recording the proceedings is to ensure the accuracy of the formal record of the proceedings. It will be prohibited to privately record, by visual and audio recording devices, committee proceedings without the prior written permission of the committee. The costings will be conveyed to the general public in due course, in sufficient time for the public to evaluate their significance or otherwise in the context of the referendum. The committee reserves the right to amend this protocol if it deems it appropriate to do so. The Chairman may also, in running the meetings, adjust any of the procedures I have mentioned if he believes it necessary in the context of his complete discretion. I ask Mr. Kieran Allen of www.VoteNo.ie to address the joint committee. Mr. Kieran Allen: In my submission, I will outline why I think the process is unfair. We are very concerned about the manner in which these meetings will be conducted. It is clear from what has been reported that the “No” and “Yes” sides will not be given equal time. Public money will spent on promoting the almost overwhelming majority view of this committee. Chairman: Can I interrupt Mr. Allen for a moment? The purpose of today’s meeting is to adduce evidence that may be beneficial to the public, and to the committee, in forming conclusions about the contents of the treaty and its positive or negative effects on the country. We are not part of a debate on the “whys” or “wherefores”. The committee has agreed to give Mr. Allen an opportunity to speak at this meeting. Every other person who wishes to speak will be given such an opportunity regardless of whether he or she is on the “Yes” or “No” side. No special concessions will be made to the “Yes” or the “No” sides. Those who suggest beforehand that they will not get fair play will be regarded as objectionable. Mr. Kieran Allen: I am sorry if I am regarded as “objectionable”. Chairman: All right. Mr. Kieran Allen: My submission relates to the process and to one article of the Lisbon treaty. I will refer to it as the “Lisbon treaty”. The manner in which the establishment here approaches the treaty suggests that it does not take the debate on it seriously. The debate should be about the content of the treaty the details and clauses, etc. If that is to happen, the right of the Irish people to know what is in the treaty will have to be upheld. If one compares what is happening in Ireland to what happened in France, one will observe an awful contrast. In France, a parliamentary committee did not waste or use, depending on one’s view taxpayers’ money to promote its view. Copies of the proposed EU constitution were made freely available to the people of France in their post offices to enable them to evaluate the treaty. As a result, the turn out in the referendum in France was more than 70%. A deliberate strategy is being promoted by the political elite here. It involves ensuring that money is not spent on making the details of the treaty available to the people and thereby preventing a debate on the content of the treaty as opposed to extraneous issues from taking place. When I consider the type of debate being conducted, it seems to me that an attempt is being made to include many extraneous issues in the discussion and avoid considering the content of the treaty. Chairman: Will Mr. Allen concentrate on the treaty for the benefit of this exercise? Mr. Kieran Allen: I will, if I am allowed to make my point. I want to deal with the type of arguments being made on the treaty. The first argument being made is that if people vote “No”, Ireland’s standing will go down and we will endanger foreign investment. Proponents of this argument cannot explain why after France voted “No”, foreign direct investment there shot up dramatically. Before the vote on the treaty, foreign investment there was €32.6 billion a year, but in 2005, the year of the vote, foreign investment was €81 billion and in 2006, it remained at €81 billion. We are not so arrogant as to claim that the “No” vote increased foreign investment, we merely claim that a “No” vote does not damage foreign investment. We ask proponents of the “Yes” side to refrain from that argument as there is no empirical evidence for it. The “Yes” camp has claimed that the Lisbon treaty is necessary to streamline EU decision making. It suggests that with enlargement it would be very difficult to have the required decision-making structure and, therefore, the EU would be obstructed in its decision making. There is no evidence for this. The EU has stated references to this may be found on the VoteNo.ie website: The accession of ten new members in 2004 and of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 has not slowed down decision-making. The EU’s institutions continue to function: new members of the European Parliament play an active role in its political groups; the Barroso Commission works effectively with 27 Commissioners; and the Council takes decisions [I stress] as well as before.
I ask the “Yes” side not to use the argument that the treaty is about streamlining, because the EU Commission makes it perfectly clear there is no problem on the issue of decision making. Chairman: I wish to make a point. Today’s delegations might say that all of the groups that have appeared before the committee so far have been pro-treaty, but they said and indicated they were not necessarily so. They did not set out to inform the committee of the mistakes being made by the other side. They did not address the “No” lobby for example and say it was wrong. I want today’s group to address the issues of the treaty on which they think the people should be given information before they cast their vote on it, as opposed to a critique of what the “Yes” people say. It is a matter for the committee to do that job at a later stage. Senator Feargal Quinn: I want to comment on the suggestion that all of the groups so far seem to have been on the “Yes” side. I have not decided yet and, therefore, I am sitting here hoping to learn something that will influence me one way or the other at each of our meetings. I urge the delegations not to lose the objective, which is to influence me, the others and the people. I urge them not to waste time on extraneous matters, but to concentrate on what they might do to influence us. Chairman: Issues only. That is correct, Senator. Mr. Kieran Allen: My first point was on the process and how the debate is being conducted. I think that is important, particularly the point about the treaty being available free of charge to citizens. I will move my focus to one article of the treaty, namely, the protocol on the Internal Market and competition. The protocol reads: CONSIDERING that the internal market, as set out in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, includes a system ensuring that competition is not distorted
HAVE AGREED THAT:
to this end, the Union shall, if necessary, take action under the provisions of the Treaties, including under Article 308 ...
This is an important element of the treaty. I now wish to draw the committee’s attention to a concern raised by trade unionists which gives reasons, on this ground alone, for rejecting the treaty. My colleagues will deal with other aspects of the treaty, but on this ground I want to draw attention to two court cases that have taken place. The protocol is as legally valid as the rest of the treaty, and if the treaty goes ahead as proposed, the two judgments that have already been made will stand. We will also see more judgments in that regard. The first judgment is the Laval judgment. The Laval judgment of the European Court of Justice on 18 December ruled it illegal for trade unions to take action against a Latvian company which refused to enter into agreements with the trade unions in Sweden to pay the registered rate for the building industry. This would be the equivalent in Ireland of a company coming here and agreeing to pay the minimum rate, but not agreeing to pay the registered rate for class A, B and D construction workers. The European Court of Justice ruled that the action of the trade union movement in attempting to prevent the company from undercutting the wages and living standards of Swedish workers, 89% of whose building workers were members of unions, was illegal. It did so under the articles guaranteeing open competition in the European Union. Although this case was in the offing for three years and although the statespersons in the Union were asked to address the issue, they refused to address it and, instead, have inserted this protocol ensuring undistorted competition. Most recently, the European Court of Justice has struck down a law in the German state of Lower Saxony, which only allowed public contracts to be awarded to companies and subcontractors who agree to pay workers a minimum wage agreed by regional collective agreements. The case was brought before the court after a Polish company paid workers according to the Polish national minimum wage, which amounted to only 46.5% of Lower Saxony’s minimum wage. As a strong trade unionist and socialist, I am deeply concerned that the types of conditions being developed in Europe, which now amount to an attack on trade union rights and the right of workers to stand up for registered agreements, will be exacerbated rather than dealt with by the Lisbon treaty. On those grounds alone, I believe the people should vote “No” and establish our right to a social Europe rather than one dominated by corporations and their neoliberal agenda. Chairman: Thank you. I invite Mr. Cole to make his presentation. Mr. Roger Cole: While a formal date has not been fixed, it would appear that sometime in June the people of the Republic of Ireland will have the right to vote on whether they accept this renamed EU constitution, now called the Lisbon treaty. Irish people living in Northern Ireland have been denied that right, the right to vote on the issue in a referendum, as indeed have all the people in other EU states. The reason for this is simple. An average of polls taken in all EU states demonstrates that 75% of people want to have a right to vote on the treaty by way of a referendum. However, they will not be given the chance because the French, the Dutch and many others, if given the chance, would, undoubtedly, vote “No”. Our contention is that far from being the laughing stock of Europe if they vote “No”, the Irish people will be cheered to the rafters if they do so, judging by all the e-mails I have received on the matter. Our analysis is that the EU political elite essentially seeks to transfer power away from the peoples of the different countries to the EU institutions, namely, the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. Our analysis is that the treaty creates a European superstate. I do not want people to just take my word for that. When speaking on the treaty José Manuel Barroso, President of the EU Commission, said: Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimensions of empire.
Ireland was previously, of course, part of a centralised, militarised, neoliberal superstate, namely, the British union. Politicians encouraged Irish people to join the various battle groups of that union and to go and take part in the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan and many other parts of the world. Essentially the argument was that while they were Irish, they were also British. Now, instead of our people being considered as both Irish and British, the people who advocate the treaty now think we are both Irish and European. Again people are encouraged to take part in all the different battle groups. Chairman: I do not want to keep interrupting. I am trying to keep the same format as in the other hearings whereby derogatory references were not made about those who had other opinions. Challenges were made and points were raised. It is better to concentrate on the issues in the treaty and how they will affect the people. The committee can debate who is right and who wrong at the end. Mr. Roger Cole: It seems perfectly reasonable to me that I should quote the President of the EU Commission on the treaty. It does not seem particularly unreasonable that I should quote the effective leader of the EU on what he thinks it means. Deputy Timmy Dooley: It must be in context. Mr. Roger Cole: This is about the treaty. It is his description of what he believes the treaty is about. Chairman: We will come to that. In the interests of order I ask people to keep to the issue, spend less time debating what the other side is thinking and saying, and try to address the issues in the treaty as they will affect the people. Mr. Roger Cole: I would have thought that the decision of the President of the Commission and what he thinks is of relevance to the people. If he thinks the EU is becoming an empire I would have thought that relevant. |