Mary Banotti is wrong when she says there is no chance that Ireland will ratify the Nice Treaty. We could do so, but only with decisive political leadership and the use of a vigorous broom to clear out all the sanctimonious, neutralist baggage which has cluttering up our brains for decades, by Kevin Myers
Bertie Ahern can secure his place in history by declaring that Irish neutrality no longer has any use or relevance. In fact, it only had any sort of meaning in the world of our imaginations, which were made delirious from overdoses of intravenous piety. Thus public discussion of this topic became no more than a holiness competition: all Irish politicians were neutral, only some were more neutral than others.
So, it won't be easy undoing a policy which became a moral cornerstone of Irish public life; but it can be done, and the first step is to ignore the various liberal, neutralist commentators who set the tone for this discussion - the ones who once upon a time soft-soaped the USSR, and who still talk today about the intrinsic wickedness of defence expenditure, and the evils of US imperialism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Thatcher's reforms
These are precisely the sort of people who opposed Margaret Thatcher's reforms of the British economy, which turned a stagnant millpond, the joke of the world, into the most vibrant economy in Europe, with one exception. The exception is us. Why are we the exception? Because we followed the British example. We cut direct taxes, and we liberated enterprise from the crushing burdens of State confiscations. And who so strenuously opposed this? Well, you know who.
These people are loud, wrong and almost everywhere. They are dominant in the media and on university campuses. Their visceral anti-Americanism generally means that any US foreign policy is deemed more of an expression of an imperialist coercion than a statement of logical self-interest. So on the one hand, we in Ireland live within the American imperium, guarded by American weaponry, protected by American political power; on the other hand, what passes for our intelligentsia endlessly denounces the very political system which has protected its right to denounce it.
Although such commentators set the tone of debate, not merely in Ireland but across Europe, they don't represent ordinary people. But if the latter in this country have been confused on the question of neutrality, it is not surprising. Not merely have they been spoon-fed the intelligentsia's usual anti-US neutralist bilge, but the political establishment has blackmailed itself into echoing similar sentiments, even though it doesn't in its heart actually believe them.
Voices of voodoo
Bertie: reach out. Grab that hypocritical bull, neutrality, by the horns, and get rid of it. Look at its most ardent defenders - the tree-hugging greens, and the kneecapping greens. These are the voices of voodoo, not of reason. You can't compete in a mumbo-jumbo argument with them: they'll always win, because they don't need to make sense. All they want to do is to make themselves feel better. They don't have to run a country, or ensure that dole queues shorten, or that the rule of law is enforced impartially and with rigour, in North Kerry and South Dublin alike.
Moreover, we have a duty to our neighbours in the EU and to our friends in the US. We have to pull our weight, not merely because that is what grown-ups do, but also because if we renege on our military duties, we will lose politically elsewhere. The Eurocrats of Brussels are getting increasingly impatient with our dithering and intellectual equivocation over Nice and the European Reaction Force. They're hardly going to pay much attention to us when we decide to oppose Romano Prodi's insensate aspiration to control national budgets.
As we must - for there, now, lies a central piece of self-interest. If we surrender power over our economy to the high-taxation, high-state-expenditure, high-unemployment mandarins of Brussels, and to Potti Prodi in particular, we can bid farewell to the economic prosperity of the past 10 years.
In other words, the price of budgetary independence could well be for us to abandon our neutrality. When at last we publicly enter a real world in which we acknowledge that grown-up countries have real armies and a real ability to defend themselves, we will be in a far stronger position to defend our vital self-interests within the EU. To sacrifice those interests for the sake of defending the chimera of "neutrality" is insanity.
Workers' Party
To be sure, most Irish commentators will insist that our "neutrality" is respected around the world. That is simple poppycock. Our neutrality is a matter of ridicule throughout the chancelleries of Europe. Those who defend our neutrality today are probably the same sort of people who not so long ago had a soft spot for the political and economic bilge being spouted by the Workers' Party.
They call themselves "left", but they are reactionaries, living in an intellectual world which simply is unrelated to the real world we now live in. Within this post-September 11th reality, former Communist countries are queuing up to join a NATO in which even Russia will have a vital consultative role.
The Taoiseach has no meaningful opposition in the Dáil. He has been brave and clear-sighted in acknowledging the complexity of our military past. The forthcoming referendum on Nice gives him the historic opportunity to show real and decisive leadership about our military future. Irish neutrality is meaningful only in the impediment it offers to the pursuit of our own national self-interests. It's time to dump it.