My pro-Ganley instincts are just not enough to overcome my loathing of the 'No' scaremongers
NO one has ever changed his mind so totally since Lazarus decided against death and promptly headed off for a threesome with Mary Magdalene and her randy cousin, Buxom Di, the Bethlehem Bi. But I was against Lisbon. Now I'm for it.
Why? Well, a 'No' pamphlet shoved in my letter box the other day asked me this: "Do we need an EU 'supreme court' to overrule our values?" Straight answer? Yes, we bloody well do.
I know our values: we all do. They were evident in Listowel the other day when John O'Donoghue was feted and mobbed like an all-conquering Fabius, home from the Punic wars. They were evident when the Tanaiste said she had given the creature Molloy a five-year top-up on his pension to expedite his departure.
Wrong, he had already resigned. His departure was thus guaranteed -- until this Government renegotiated with him, added the number they'd first thought of, multiplied it by two, and told him to keep the change. Which is, of course, what they'd already done with naive Neary, the bright lad who, for a decade, failed to spot Sean FitzPatrick tottering out of Anglo Irish Bank with tens of millions a year.
So, so much for our "values".
The 'No' pamphlet also showed a picture of a large hypodermic with the caption: "Will we get EUthanasia?" Well, that kind of disgusting and disingenuous question is what we repeatedly got during the infamous divorce referendum debate in the 1980s. And my answer is that if we do get EUthanasia, the very first people we should EUthanase are the fine fellows who went in for EUthanasia scare tactics before the referendum.
A comparable piece of mischief was at work with the pamphlet's sly and grubby query: "Do you wish to split up the family farm?" Ah, that one again.
At least, the 'No' pamphlet spares us any wheedling insinuations about conscription and neutrality -- perhaps because the authors know that, aside from the fir-bolg Left, as characterised by the Rossport potties, most people know that our neutrality is dead. We are Europeans. Our soldiers must be part of the European Reaction Force, and have already served in Chad within that military framework.
"Would you like MUCH more immigration?" asks the pamphlet. No, of course I wouldn't, but voting 'No' to Lisbon is not going to change existing European immigration laws. Moreover, I suspect the Brussels elite knows that the Turkey project, which the pamphlet warns against, and which would allow the movement of tens of millions of Muslims into western European welfare states, is dead. They're just trying to break the news gently to the Turks.
But anyway, if mainland Europe is determined to commit cultural and demographic suicide, so be it. Just how is a mouse to stop a herd of determined bison charging off a cliff?
Personally, I admire Declan Ganley. I like him because he's an outsider, and he arouses the neuroses of the Druidic-tendency in Irish life, which is suspicious of anyone whose tribal credentials are not 100pc guaranteed Hibernian, through five full generations of native birth.
So anything that gets up their bigoted nasal passages is just fine by me. And better still, I loved the way that official "liberal" Ireland treated him as a dangerous foreign pariah. 'The Irish Times' exultantly published the guest list for his dinner last November, rather like Senator Joe McCarthy naming "communists" in the State Department.
Why, I would have been proud to have been on that list of foreign agents -- and indeed, I was invited, but alas, I was away on the Western Front, honouring our war dead. However, I'm afraid, all my pro-Ganley instincts are not enough to overcome my loathing of the 'No' scaremongering.
YES, I know that Fianna Fail, the author of most of our misfortunes, wants us to vote 'Yes'. And yes, I'm aware that ahead lies a vast and suffocating Eurocracy, with a united Europe of endless red tape and corruption as the destination. But frankly, I don't give a damn any more. I'd rather be governed by a parcel of fork-tongued Euro-reptiles than have to face the prospect of autonomous Fianna Fail governments into the indefinite future, with the same ghastly script, for ever and ever and ever. Ah, and here is the new Taoiseach, Beverley Flynn, with the youngest member of the cabinet, her daughter, the Minister For Banking Probity. Meanwhile, up in the Park the whole nauseating caboodle is concealed behind the acceptable face of Fianna Fail, the latest President Mary Goody Two Shoes.
Now my personal choice for our future is simple: it is to apply to join the US, with a gift of Shannon as a bribe, in perpetuity, regardless of rejection or acceptance. But would the US want this parcel of inept and unrepentant thieves? Never. Equally importantly, we don't appear to want the US. So the EU it is: a marriage of convenience. And like a Jane Austen's Charlotte Lucas at the altar with Mr Collins, I will gaggingly splutter to my serial-polygamist spouse, the fat and flatulent Madame Bruxelles: "And with my body I do thee worship."
And silently mutter: Like phuq I do. But needs must.
kmyers@independent.ie
- Kevin Myers
