Cowen must ask where his primary loyalty lies
The message from the voters must go to Irish politicians and the mandarins in Brussels, says Frederick Forsyth
Sunday June 15 2008
THE main reason that I decided as a teenager to become a journalist rather than stay on as an RAF pilot was that I was born cursed or blessed with a burning curiosity.
I simply love working out, finding out or being told the answers to the six interrogatives. What (happened); where (did it take place); when (did it occur); who (was responsible); how (was it achieved). But the sixth is always the big one: I call it 'the reason why'.
Since I have now become a storyteller, let me tell a couple of stories that have seemed to become enigmas, but which hide their reason why. Back in January 1963, I sat, literally for there were too few chairs in the hall, at the feet of Charles de Gaulle as he rebuffed Harold Macmillan's application for Britain to join the Common Market.
De Gaulle was already an iconic figure, bestriding not just France, but all Europe. On the one hand he regarded himself as a passionate European. I can see him now, hands raised, palms upward, great schnozzle raised to the heavens, intoning: "Je suis un EUROPEEN."
And he truly believed it. France had co-founded and joined the EEC in 1957, the year before he came to power, and though he repudiated almost everything he inherited from the Fourth Republic, the European dream he embraced with passion.
Yet, yet, yet . . . he would absolutely not contemplate the departure of one single gramme of French sovereignty to others. He pulled France out of Nato and expelled Nato HQ from France because he believed even that impugned the sovereignty of his beloved France. But how on Earth could this be when we all know that huge transfers of national sovereignty are part and parcel of membership?
The answer is there were always two alternative destinations for the European dream. He believed utterly in the Union des Patries; a union of wholly sovereign nation states whose internal autonomy was not even a subject for discussion.
When the German president of the EEC Commission in Brussels, Dr Walter Hallstein, tried a tiny measure of integration, Le Grand Charles became so angry he withdrew the French delegate and all business terminated while he was on the throne. He died in November 1970, before he could see how utterly wrong he had been.
Now fast-forward five years. British premier Harold Wilson gave called a referendum in the summer of 1975. The subject was not entry into the EEC (Common Market). We had joined with the Irish in 1973. It was a referendum of endorsement . . . or rejection. Among those passionately canvassing for a Yes vote was one Margaret Thatcher.
Thirteen years later, she walked into a hall in Bruges, Belgium, and gave a speech ending with the words "No, No, No". She was not, as she had been accused, denouncing the whole European Union (as it had become). She was calling for no more transfers of national sovereignty from our respective parliaments to Brussels. Once again, what was the reason why?
She, too, had become a dedicated believer in the Union des Patries, which we called the 'Europe of Nations'. But eight years as prime minister had taught her what De Gaulle had never lived to learn. Even the last vestige of national autonomy had got nothing whatsoever to do with the real destination of what the French call Le Grand Projet. Others have tried, others have spoken, but the juggernaut just rolls on, and what we think seems to have nothing to do with it. Now the Irish have spoken again.
The key question was therefore always this: Where exactly is the EU going? What, precisely, will be its final destination? Is that really such an impertinent question? After all, which of us would pack the entire family into a coach, plane or train and never think to ask: Where are we going? Where are you taking us?
The President of the EU Commission, Senor Barroso, recently gave a hint. He said the EU was developing into the world's next empire. Now for some of us that rings an old bell. For an empire, by definition, cannot be created by volition and it cannot be governed democratically. The Irish had several centuries on the receiving end of someone else's empire.
The nightmare of those denounced as EU-sceptics is that there is a covert destination; not a Union of Nations, but a single mega-state, with all our beloved homelands subsumed into it as devolved regional territories and ruled locally by native governors whose vital primary loyalty must be not to their ain folk but to the federal capital. For some of us that would be not dream, but nightmare.
So have the Irish, by their courageous vote, said No to the entire European Union? Certainly not. What I think they have done is send a message, and the message is this:
"We Irish are an old and proud people, and not to be treated like colonial serfs. We are not to have blank cheques tossed at us with the instruction to 'sign here and sign now if you know what is good for you'. We do not appreciate that the document put before us was deliberately unreadable and even less do we appreciate the pretty naked threats thrown our way by certain people east of Calais.
"We insist on a document we can all understand and the time to comprehend where we are really going and to discuss it among ourselves. For that is the democratic way and that is the Irish way."
To say all that with a single cross on a piece of paper is very clever! But your message must now go to two groups of people.
It must go to your Irish politicians, for all three major parties urged you to sign the blank cheque, which might as well have been written in Classical Greek. Your Taoiseach Brian Cowen must now think: does he cleave to the Irish land and people that bore and bred him, or has he transferred his obedience to others in their Brussels committee rooms? In short, where does his crucial primary loyalty lie? Perhaps it is time for all Ireland's politicians, civil servants and diplomats to consider to whom they owe their first allegiance.
It is to Ireland and her people.
And your message must go to the mandarins of Brussels, and their reaction will tell you much. If they reply: "Screw the Irish. We will simply ignore and crush them," then that is an answer indeed. For it will tell us what kind of government Brussels has in store for us all. Democratic or autocratic? The Irish know both. You had the second from Strongbow to Kilmainham Jail; and the former from Collins to Cowen. What does the future hold?
Or Brussels could say: "OK, we made a mistake. We must go back to the drafting table and rewrite our constitutional treaty in clear, layman's language and explain why we think it is vital. And we must explain, nay indeed prove, to each ethnic group on this marvellous continent, from Galway Bay to Warsaw, just what it will be that they will one day bequeath to their children. But we must not try to govern the Irish from behind closed doors or with threats because it does not work."
If they do this it will cost an extra year and several million euros. But we are a thousand years old and our countries are, to us, worth more than jewels. The Irish have been very brave. And on behalf of the 60 million Brits across the water, whose quisling politicians gave us a pledge of referendum and then broke it, I offer a humble thank you.
- Frederick Forsyth
