O Cuiv defends his right to say No to treaty

The Minister of State for Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr Eamon O Cuiv, has sharply attacked "the Establishment", including politicians, trade union and farming leaders, for criticising the electorate's rejection of the Nice Treaty.

Defending his decision to vote No and to declare that he had done so afterwards, Mr O Cuiv said it was "most extraordinary" that his right to vote would be questioned.

Rounding on the Establishment, he said: "They seemed, in some way, to infer that when the people exercised their constitutional right [they] first of all had no right to do so, and, secondly, that they were either fools, or knaves.

"I took exception to that, I take exception to people saying that the 55 per cent of people who voted in this, and they are the only ones that we can measure, had not the right to vote the way that they voted."

Later, he went further. "In my view, they were insulting the intelligence of the electorate and I felt that it was incumbent on somebody in a position to show that the people were concerned about this and that people could have very, very serious reservations."

Regardless of how they had voted, he said many people "up and down the country" were now "feeling sore" that Thursday's result was not being "respected".

Asked how he would stand if the Government put the treaty to the people in another referendum, he said: "We will cross that bridge when we come to it."

He would have revealed that he had voted No even if the treaty had been passed "if the No vote had been treated with the same contempt".

Ireland's European Commissioner, Mr David Byrne, and the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, had both responded calmly to the result. "But a lot of the rest of the comment was hysterical and antidemocratic," Mr O Cuiv said.

The Taoiseach, he believed, saw his action "exactly the way it is". "I was very loyal to the Government, that I absolutely followed Government policy.

"The secrecy of the ballot is sacrosanct. There is no tie on any citizen from the highest to the lowest to vote in any predetermined way once they go into the ballot box. It is an absolute fundamental principle of democracy," he said.

Rather than berating voters, he said the Establishment in Ireland, and in the rest of the EU, should listen to what the people had said and address their concerns.

Although he was not "implacably opposed" to the treaty, he said he had voted "on balance" against it. "Nobody said, and we have to be quite clear about this, that the treaty was perfect." Supportive of enlargement, he said the arrival of small central and eastern European and Mediterranean countries "in the longer term" will "add a counter-weight to the centre which is very, very badly needed".

"Therefore, I have no difficulty in saying that there were elements of the treaty and what was proposed that were very, very good in the long term," he said during an RTE Radio 1 interview yesterday morning.

He said he had an obligation to support the Government's Yes campaign and not to declare his voting intention in advance.

Speeches made by a number of key European Union leaders, including the President of the European Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, during the campaign's course had swayed some voters.

They had "put the frighteners on a lot of people" and raised serious concerns about the direction that "some people" wanted the EU to travel in the years ahead.

During his time in the Departments of Agriculture, and Arts, Heritage, the Gaeltacht and the Islands, he said he had had "direct experience of the inflexibility of the European bureaucracy and the difficulties in dealing with them".

"They have had at times a totally irrational view on how much they want to dictate the detail as well as the general policy," he complained.