Madam, - In the excellent 10-page supplement on the Irish EU presidency (The Irish Times, January 5th), the article on the anti-EU protests that can be expected over the next six months was extremely worrying.
This is not simply because it revealed that certain groups were planning to protest against EU policy - protest being part and parcel of every democracy - but because of the anti-EU arguments put forward by the "facilitator" of the "Another Europe is Possible Alliance", which is planning the protests.
Calling for a major protest on May 1st to coincide with the historic enlargement of the EU from 15 to 25 members, the "facilitator" claims that "bringing these countries into Europe is going to do nothing for their peoples. It is only going to impoverish them more."
The evidence for this assertion is not clear. From the experience of previous rounds of enlargement, membership has had a very beneficial effect on the peoples of new member-states, Ireland being a good case in point.
And given that, in all the nine accession countries where referendums were held on the issue, a majority of people voted Yes, clearly they don't believe that EU membership will make them poorer.
The alliance's "facilitator", referring to the May 1st enlargement date, claims the leaders of the member-states are "taking a day which is traditionally used to uphold workers' rights, and defend people who are exploited, and they are turning it into a celebration of neo-liberalism."
May 1st was nowhere more celebrated than in the former Communist countries, for all the good it did the workers of these states. It is time that the peoples of these countries, who were exploited for decades, be allowed finally to choose and celebrate a path to a better future without Irish people claiming enlargement is merely a "celebration of neo-liberalism".
Such nonsense shows the desperate lengths to which some anti-EU groups will go to argue that Europe is taking the wrong direction, no matter what the issue. While no one would claim the EU is perfect, those who oppose (and have always opposed) its development on every front have nothing to offer the Irish people. - Yours, etc.,
HUGH DELANEY, Via Eurialo, Rome.