THE SLEEPY town of Millstreet in north Co Cork is twinned with Pommerit-le-Vicomte in Brittany, France. It has the largest ratio of Polish people living in Ireland – 14 per cent of its 1,500 population – and it went to great trouble to host the Eurovision Song Contest in 1993.

So you might think the locals would be well-disposed towards Europe. Not all of them, it seems.

In a letter penned in June to the Financial Regulator, Dermot Kiely, the treasurer of Millstreet Parish Credit Union, had a right old rant about a proposed voluntary consumer protection code for the State’s 420 credit unions, which he said is being “pushed by Europe”.

Kiely let the EU have both barrels in his missive to the regulator. “EU thinking is driven by the liberal left, who want to control everything,” he wrote.

“These people are the heirs to the so-called ‘enlightenment’ of the 18th century. This led on to the French Revolution with its massacres of innocent people and the ‘reign of terror’.

“Later, this thinking led to the rise of socialism, Marxism, communism and Naziism (national socialism) . . .

“We do not need that kind of thinking in Ireland,” Kiely added, without any sense of irony.

According to Kiely, the founding fathers of the credit union movement here half a century ago would never have started it if they had foreseen this attempt to “impose totalitarian control”.

The new code, he said, is a recipe for driving all the volunteers out of credit unions as “they will not stand for this type of tyranny”.

He closes his letter by stating that civil servants here should “serve the Irish people and not some foreign masters”.

Kiely is what you might call a “Rebel” without a cause.