Since the referendum on the Nice Treaty there has been a series of articles and editorials in this paper pleading for a rolling back of the equality principles of the McKenna judgment. Would the current campaign to change the referendum rules be so vigorous if the Irish voters had said Yes in the Nice referendum instead of No?
The main political parties are furious at having lost the Nice Treaty referendum and want to re-run exactly the same referendum next year in order to get a different result. To make certain of that, they want to rig the referendum rules in their own favour.
This campaign to change the referendum rules is being orchestrated by a certain section of the media and is being pushed by a handful of politicians on the All-Party Committee on the Constitution. An all-party committee, I might add, that only includes the big parties and none of the parties which+ opposed Nice. Central to this campaign is an assault on the work of the Referendum Commission without any attempt to acknowledge the impossible conditions in which this commission has had to work.
The Referendum Commission has never been given a fair chance to prove itself, or to be the valuable tool of public political education that it could be. This is because the politicians have saddled it with an impossible task in relation to the major referendums it has had to publicise.
Complex issues of vital importance have been lumped together on the same day and the time given to the commission has been completely inadequate.
Is it any wonder that the commission's chairman, former chief justice Mr T.A. Finlay, publicly complained of the lack of time it was being given to do its statutory job? There were no editorial complaints in The Irish Times about this abuse.
UCD professor of politics Richard Sinnott was hired as a paid adviser to the then attorney general in that case. Although the High Court and the Supreme Court rejected the argument he supported, Prof Sinnott is still calling in this paper for public money to be given on an unequal basis to the political parties in referendums.
The members of the Referendum Commission are people of unimpeachable integrity - chairman Mr Finlay, the Ombudsman, the Clerks of the Dβil and Seanad, and the Comptroller and Auditor General.
They are statutorily obliged to be fair to both sides. This contrasts with the political party leaders, who want to be subsidised out of public resources in order to push a one-sided, biased message.
The advantage of using the Referendum Commission is that it is statutorily required to ensure that the essential arguments For and Against are relevant to the referendum proposition.
The commission itself vets these arguments for relevance. So the Yes and No advertisements cannot tell lies, bring in extraneous matter unrelated to the issue or be slanted by spin-doctors. However, advertisements placed by political parties and other campaigning groups are not required to be relevant and true.
Political parties and individual politicians can lie and mislead the people and normally do so in the course of election and referendum campaigns. But should they be given public money to do that more effectively?
Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas O'Higgins's unprecedented attack on a Supreme Court judgment in his recent article in this paper seems to me to be motivated by his dislike of the people's verdict on Nice and, like those who support him, he too wants to re-run the Nice referendum under different rules to obtain a different result.
Mr O'Higgins is associated with a political party, Fine Gael, which fought hard against Fianna Fβil's attempts to abolish PR and replace it with the British first-past-the-post system in 1959 and 1968.
Would he have approved of the then Fianna Fβil government being free to spend huge amounts of public money to push that policy?
Patricia McKenna is a Green Party MEP for Dublin