The EU is engine of inequality

Europe Day was commemorated with the now familiar gusto by the cheerleaders of the EU project. Ireland would be a mildly modernised version of Ireland of the 1950s were it not for the EU.

There would still be salary and job discrimination against women; we would never have seen the Celtic Tiger; we would be the backwater we were.

Of course there have been gains from EU membership, the most important being the broadening of our horizons. There have been the Cap, the regional and structural funds and other subsidies. There has been access to the wider markets of the EU. We were prompted to end some of the discriminations against women that probably would have persisted longer had we not joined. We benefited also from EU directives on the environment.

On the whole, we are better off as members of the EU than we would have been had we stayed outside or had delayed membership beyond 1973. But such enthusiasm is the mechanism for the creation of common mindsets that everything about the EU is fine and democratic and fair.

Again yesterday it was asserted that the EU has preserved peace in Europe since the second World War and has kept the historic belligerents, Germany and France, from each other's throats. This is bunkum. Peace in Europe was maintained by the cold war. The perceived conflict in Europe was between east and west and so cataclysmic was the prospect of that conflict that any other was unthinkable. The EU has had nothing to do with peace in Europe. Zilch.

Neither has the EU been responsible for the economic regeneration of Europe. The Marshall Plan was responsible, along with the division of Europe. The Marshall Plan could not have worked had Europe not been divided; any attempt to spread the proceeds of the plan to the eastern part of Europe after the war would have left it ineffective across Europe.

What the EU did was try to create an open market, to allow market forces full rein in the widest possible area. I write "try" because member states have tried to rig the market to favour their domestic interests, and most of the EU directives and regulations have been designed to stop the rigging.

The EU was founded and remains premised on the economic philosophy that free markets are an unqualified good. That essentially is what the EU is all about. Monetary union and a single currency are part of the means of creating a single market. There was the add-on of the Common Agricultural Policy to soften the blow to farmers, but that was an incidental. The structural and regional funds were designed to make the play of market forces less devastating for the poorer regions.

There is no constitution anywhere in the world that has a commitment to free market economics, let alone, as in the case of the EU constitution, where it is fundamental. The market is a fine mechanism for dealing with diverse and conflicting choices of goods and services but, as has been recognised by the original philosophers of free markets (for instance, Adam Smith and John Locke), it leads to unfairness once some market "players" capture a disproportionate share of the goods and are thereby in a position to dominate markets and to distort them. Locke acknowledged there had to be periodic share-outs of goods, so that the process can start off all over again.

But in the EU there is no provision for periodic share-outs. Although there are mechanisms for determining anti-competitive practices, there is no going back to scratch and starting all over again. Nor realistically could there be, which is a fatal flaw in Locke's political philosophy - he constructs a system which he acknowledges would be ultimately unfair and then suggests a remedy which he must have known could not work.

In individual countries there is the taxation mechanism to redistribute income - although Colm O'Gorman's Progressive Democrats party, which he thinks is committed to equality, is genetically averse to such redistributive measures. In the EU there is no such mechanism. Ultimately the EU is an engine of inequality, without any balancing mechanisms to redress the worst ravages of inequality.

It is an engine of inequality because the free, undisturbed operation of market forces creates inequality, favouring those whose skills are marketable at any one time, disfavouring those whose skills are not. Aside from this the EU has added on to itself other competences in justice and home affairs, in immigration and of course foreign policy.

In taking decisions in these areas, democratic control is essentially removed. There is no means of holding the Council of Ministers or indeed the European Council itself (that is the meeting of all the heads of government) accountable. Decisions are taken in secret and represent a compromise. Individual member states and their electorates can do nothing about such decisions. We have carved out the template for a hugely divided Europe but most of us will not live to see the dangerous consequences work themselves out.