NATIONAL PLATFORM:RATIFICATION OF the Lisbon Treaty would result in a "constitutional revolution" that would have deeply negative repercussions for Irish citizens, the National Platform asserted yesterday.
The group, which is campaigning for a No vote, said the constitutional aspects of the treaty had gone almost without mention in the referendum debate so far.
According to its spokesman, Trinity College Dublin lecturer Anthony Coughlan, it is clear that the treaty would create a new European Union which would constitutionally be very different from the present EU.
He said the adoption of the treaty would give the EU “supremacy over the Irish Constitution as regards its ‘laws, acts and measures’.”
“The treaty would endow this post-Lisbon EU with the constitutional form of a supranational European federation – in effect a state – in which Ireland and the other member states would have the constitutional status of provincial or regional states,” he said.
Mr Coughlan argued that, after Lisbon, the EU would look like a state. This view, he said, was based on four premises: that the EU would have a legal personality; that the European community would be abolished; that the union would have a unified constitutional structure; and that all citizens would then become “real citizens” of the post-Lisbon EU.