A newly-formed group campaigning for a No vote in the forthcoming Lisbon Treaty referendum has said that Irish people will in effect be voting for a new EU constitution.
VoteNo.ie, supported by the Socialist Workers Party, launched its campaign in Dublin yesterday with strong criticism of the manner in which it said the European elite was trying to railroad the treaty through.
One of its leading figures, UCD sociology lecturer Kieran Allen, said the treaty should have been voted for by all people in Europe because it was the EU constitution by proxy.
"Bertie Ahern says that 90 per cent of the EU constitution is contained in it. In effect we are voting for a constitution. I find it unbelievable that only four million people in Ireland will be voting on behalf of 450 million people throughout Europe."
The VoteNo.ie group said its campaign would be based on three key issues. The first is its claim that it will reaffirm the place of neoliberalism at the heart of Europe with its affirmation of open market competition.
Sinead Kennedy, another member of the group, said that key decisions on health, education, culture and the audiovisual area would no longer be exempt from many competition rules and qualified majority voting.
"The last thing that the Irish health services needs is privatisation," she said.
The second plank of its campaign, said Mr Allen, was the militarisation of Europe. It says the provisions of Article 28 mandate EU battlegroups to go to war. Mr Allen also criticised the decision to send Irish troops to Chad as contributing to colonialism.
Its third objection to the treaty is what it says is its lack of democracy.
"It does nothing to tackle the democratic deficit. It gives the EU a legal personality. It has created an EU president and an EU foreign minister. They are laying the foundation of a superstate without laying the bricks of democracy," said Mr Allen.
He did not accept the suggestion that those campaigning against the treaty would be marginal. He said the campaign would be coming predominantly from the left and his group would have nothing to do with any right-wing groups opposed to the treaty.
He said he was confident that people would make their own minds up on rejecting the treaty once the real debate began.