Can we trust our politicians? It is a sign of the times that most people will take this for a rhetorical question. Yet I believe it has to be answered very urgently in one crucial area of policy: the evolution of European military structures and our relationship to them.
Dr Garret FitzGerald tells us (The Irish Times, April 24th, 1999) that neutrality was always a myth, never a true description of our policy and behaviour. He cites as evidence our government's effective favouring of Britain and the Allies in the second World War.
He misses an essential point: whatever our government did in that war, and whatever the rights and wrongs of it, we were not bound beforehand to adopt a particular military policy irrespective of the circumstances. Such moral freedom of choice is not a selfish luxury; it is a duty we owe to whoever might be injured or killed by the actions we choose.
He then tells us our non-involvement in NATO was purely the result of a botched anti-partition "stroke" by Sean MacBride; this, however piquant, is only part of the story. Ireland in the post-war decades had, among of course many other things, a sense of emerging from a history different from that of the great and medium powers. This gave us some important affinities with newly independent UN members, and a voice which could articulate alternatives, as on nuclear disarmament and China.
Why did Dr FitzGerald in 1987 assure the Council of Major Religious Superiors: "There is nothing in the Single European Act which impedes Ireland's right to preserve its neutral position outside military alliance, and in the government's view, it would have been superfluous to include a declaration to that effect in the Single Act" (CMRS SEA briefing, April 28th, 1987). Would it not have been more helpful to inform the CMRS that its representations had, for him, all the logical status of a request for a weather forecast for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve?
The dismissal of treaty declarations as "superfluous" bespeaks in fact a realisation that neutrality, like any other important political concept, is very much alive, far from completely clear, and requiring refinement in the heat and light of public debate. What is so definitively clear about other central political concepts such as "development", "equality", or indeed "democracy" and "justice"? Do we jettison them because we disagree about them, or need to improve our pursuit of them?
Dr FitzGerald's reticence with the CMRS brings to mind a notorious "putdown" by Mr Haughey, who has had his own role in the obfuscation concerning our military options. The recent volte-face by the Taoiseach is in fact a finesse learnt at the hands of the master. In the Dail debate of December 9th, 1986, Mr Haughey accused the then government of dishonesty in claiming that military security was excluded from the SEA: "It is obvious that once this Act is ratified Ireland will be under acute pressure to go some further distance." He proceeded, in government shortly afterwards, to support its ratification.
Now, we are a few more furlongs along the same road, and Mr Ahern has cleared the hurdle of "Partnership for Peace" with consummate equestrian poise. Having objected to PfP as "a halfway house" to NATO (The Irish Times, June 2nd, 1995), he now urges us to join it, in an article (The Irish Times, May 20th, 1999) which mind-bogglingly manages not once to "mention the war" then being waged by PfP's architect, NATO. He does however touch a new depth of hilarity when he dismisses the opposing view - i.e. the view he held before the 1997 election - as "essentially defensive". What are we discussing, Taoiseach?
I therefore do not trust our leading politicians in their assurances. This is why I disagree with Peadar Kirby (The Irish Times, May 1st, 1999). I believe that he and I share the same values about development, human rights and security. I simply do not agree with him that PfP would be treated by our political establishment as a forum for courageously acting on those values, or that it would provide his envisaged alternative to "more militaristic approaches".
This is why I oppose our Government's signing up to PfP, and abandoning the promise of a referendum on that proposal. Mr Ahern in 1995 rejected the argument that we should join PfP because Sweden, Finland and Austria had done so; he now puts that very argument in the recent Explanatory Guide (May 1999). That same document sets store by Switzerland's membership of PfP, yet Mr Ahern on television recently openly jeered at Switzerland's having "a couple of referenda every week" or words to that effect.
Mr Ahern is clearly contemptuous of democracy on this issue. He sought my vote in 1997, and received preference votes from me and others, with a particular manifesto position on the issue of defence and PfP. He has since jettisoned that position, yet refuses to consult the electorate. He now has the gall to declare the forthcoming European elections a sufficient consultation on the matter. They are not, and I am formally writing to him to this effect. A bit self-important, a little histrionic? No: an assertion of my citizenship, and a refusal to have the most important contract in our society - between electorate and government - debased in a way which would give second-hand car sales a bad name.
John Maguire is former Professor of Sociology at UCC and co-author, with Joe Noonan, of Maastricht and Neutrality: Ireland's Neutrality & the Future of Europe (People First/Meitheal, Cork 1992).
