18/19 April 1998
Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin TD
seconding the Emergency Motion on the Amsterdam Treaty
18 April, 1998
In seconding this motion I want first of all to echo the call made this week by our party President Gerry Adams for the referendum on the Amsterdam Treaty to be held separately from that on the talks outcome. It would be scandalous if the government sought to ensure the passage of this major change in Irish foreign policy and military neutrality by having debate on the issue totally eclipsed by what would be seen as the main referendum.
In this anniversary year of 1798 it is ironic that we are being asked by the government to dilute yet again the degree of sovereignty that we have managed to retain in the 26 Counties
It was Wolfe Tone who first made the case for an independent Irish foreign policy and this has been a principle of all the most progressive movements in Irish history. It is policy which the Irish people support overwhelmingly and that is why the government and those parties who want us to approve the Amsterdam Treaty are so anxious to convince the people that neutrality is not under threat.
For many years now the process of European Union integration has been steadily eroding our neutrality. At each stage successive governments have given a little more away. On the few occasions they have had to come to the people to approve their latest abandonment of our rights, they have assured us that nothing has really changed.
Over and over again in the course of the past few months we have been told that this Treaty does not effect Irish neutrality. But the wording of the Treaty could not be clearer and it is patently incompatible with Irish neutrality.
The Amsterdam Treaty reiterates the EU's ``common foreign and security policy'' and ``the progressive framing of a common defence policy.''
The Treaty states: ``The Western European Union (the European wing of NATO) is an integral part of the development of the Union providing the Union with access to an operational capability ... It supports the Union in framing the defence aspects of the common foreign and security policy as set out in this Article.
``The Union shall accordingly foster closer institutional relations with the WEU with a view to the possibility of the integration of the WEU into the Union, should the European Council so decide.''
The meaning of these clauses has been made clear by statements from some of the main players in the project for the creation of an EU superstate. Leo Tindermans of the EU Parliament's Foreign and Security Policy Committee told a group of TDs and Senators on 2 January 1998: ``You cannot have a European Common Foreign and Security Policy without a European Army.''
Martin Bangermann, an EU Commissioner, wrote in January of this year ``There is no alternative to a Federal State. European unification must be seen through to a successful conclusion.''
Neutrality is totally incompatible with the Declaration adopted at Amsterdam which commits the State to support the following:
``In the `Declaration on the Role of the Western European Union and its Relations with the European Union and with the Atlantic Alliance' (NATO) of 10 December 1991, WEU member States set as their objective `to build up WEU in stages as the defence component of the European Union'. They today reaffirm this aim as developed by the Amsterdam Treaty.''
As well as moving on the project for so-called `common defense' the Amsterdam Treaty significantly hardens the EU's common foreign policy. Thus the State will be obliged to abide by majority voting on foreign policy. An unelected EU official will be appointed High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy - in effect a Foreign Minister for the entire EU.
The Irish government has also signed up to a paragraph of the Amsterdam Treaty which gets very little attention and says: ``The progressive framing of a common defence policy will be supported, as member states consider appropriate, by co-operation between them in the field of armaments.''
Isn't it ironic that while we are attempting to create a peace settlement in Ireland, to remove forever the gun from Irish politics, that the government is asking the people in this state to sign up to a Treaty that supports the European arms industries.
This part of the treaty points to the real agenda behind the drive to a common so-called defence policy.
In all the NATO and WEU countries there are military bereaucracies linked to arms industries for whom the end of the Cold War was very unwelcome indeed. Where now the excuse for the existence of this hugely profitable military-based industry ?
Instead of widespread nuclear disarmament, the wholesale reduction of armes and the convesion of arms industries, we have seen the nuclear infrastructure kept intact, the expansion of NATO and the WEU and an ever-growing arms industry fuelling wars throughout the world.
The Irish people do not want to be part of that and so we should reject the Amsterdam Treaty. We in Sinn Fein must urge the people to reject this amendment to the Constitution and urge the government to return to its EU partners and renegotiate the Amsterdam Treaty. They should also deliver the Constitutional referendum safeguarding neutrality which has been promised by two successive Ministers for Foreign Affairs, one of the Rainbow Government and that of the present Government.