Is a referendum the best way to ratify the EU Constitution? That was the issue which came to dominate the debate at the National Forum in Europe in Galway (20th May 2005).
The Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian Ministers for European Affairs and senior representatives of the other new and accession EU Member States attended the session in order to share their experience on communicating the EU Constitution to their citizens. The Constitution must be ratified by all Member States if it is to come into effect. Some countries are allowing their parliaments to decide, others, like Ireland, are doing it by way of referendum. The Irish referendum must be held before the Autumn of 2006 but it could called at any time before that.
Opening the session in the Corrib Great Southern Hotel, the Forum Chairman, Senator Maurice Hayes, spoke of the many challenges that communicating the EU Constitution presents. "We believe it more important than ever that we recognize that many citizens feel disconnected from the great projects underway, which they often perceive as Brussels driven, jargon-laden and far from the reality of their daily lives", he said. "In many of our countries, including Ireland, the government has committed to go to the people to approve the Constitution by referendum. How can we best engage and inform our citizens in genuine open debate before we ask that big question"? the Chairman asked.
The debate was led by European Affairs Minister Jaroslaw Pietras of Poland, the only new EU state to have committed, so far, to a referendum and by Minister Meglena Kuneva of Bulgaria which is about to join the EU and whose parliament has just endorsed the Constitution. Mr Pietras said that the Polish people were more likely to ratify the Constitution than were many of their politicians. "The Polish people are overwhelming in favour of it", he said. "Paradoxically, within the founding Member States of the Union there's a more sceptical attitude towards the Constitutional Treaty. It would send out a very negative message if France were to say No in their referendum on 29th May", he said.
The Minister also said that while people often cast their vote in referenda on issues other than the matter in hand, it was up to politicians to explain - in this case - the Constitution. "They should have the political courage to present a view and then defend it". Replying to a question from Professor Noel Mulcahy of Fianna Fail, Mr Pietras also said that while Poland had been given more favourable voting clout under the Nice Treaty, he believed the Constitution was a better framework than Nice for going forward in an enlarging EU. "It will make the EU more effective, better managed and better able to cope with global challenges", he said.
Minister Meglena Kuneva, Bulgaria's chief negotiator in accession talks, said the new treaty represented a reasonable and well-balanced compromise, based on the consensus achieved within the European Convention on the Future of Europe which drafted the Constitution. "We therefore agree with the main provisions which will ensure closer cooperation among member-states and enhanced international role for the European Union," she said. "The Constitution will also ensure that the enlarged Union can continue to function efficiently, while at the same time improving transparency and democratic control."
Minister Kuneva said that she believed that ratification by parliament was as democratic as putting the question to the people in a referendum. She said that in communicating the Constitution to the people of Bulgaria, the government had received the support of civil society. "We consider it very important to develop a European spirit and a feeling of being "European" for every one. This approach is inseparable from the overall communication strategy and it is going to have an increasing role in our communication activities in the short and medium term."
The most outspoken criticism of ratification by referendum came from Hungary's European Affairs Minister, András Bársony. He believed that the referendum method gave people in one country "the opportunity to kill the European dream of others - all because they don't happen to like their prime minister or deputy prime minister".
Mr Bársony said that for 18 months, opposition as well as government politicians from all across Europe had negotiated the document in the Convention on the Future of Europe. "We arrived at a document which was a consensus. Why should local issues kill this compromise?" he asked. The Minister said that voters could not be expected to know every detail in the Constitution which took so long to negotiate. Because Hungarian opposition parties were part of those negotiations, the Parliament had voted 98 per cent in favour of the Constitution after a three-day debate. "If people were to vote in a referendum and rejected it, they would be voting against the entire political class of the country,"said the Minister.
The meeting was also attended by Minister for European Affairs, Noel Treacy, Galway East TD and by local MEP Seán Ó Neachtain, both of whom are urging ratification of the Constitution but who acknowledged the challenges in communicating the issues to the people of Ireland.
Minister Treacy underlined the importance of explaining the Constitution to ensure people are as fully-informed as is possible before they vote on it.
Forum member Charlie Flanagan of Fine Gael also had reservations about the referendum system as it applies in this country. He said that people vote on national issues which he said "can skew the debate". He was also concerned at the size of the turn out for referenda. "The vote has been progressively lower in recent polls so it is now really up to the politicians to enthuse the electorate".
Mr Flanagan was also concerned about the impact on successive polls of the McKenna judgement, which prevents the State spending public money on promoting purely its side of the argument. He claimed that the Supreme Court, itself, had also skewed the debate by its McKenna judgement. "It provides a podium for nutcases and crackpots,"claimed Mr Flanagan. He said that 90 percent of the Dáil was robustly in favour of the Constitution. "It's a bad reflection on the Supreme Court when it says that half of spending must go to those advocating a "NO" vote", he said.
However, Michael McLoughlin of the Labour Party insisted that rather than seeing the McKenna judgement as an obstacle, it should provide the impetus for a good public debate on the issues in the Constitution.
His party colleague Tony Browne who had participated in the Convention which drafted the Constitution, said that the document was a framework for future political development rather than a set of new policies. He felt that there had been an attempt "to pick particular sentences out of the Constitution and to turn it into a whole campaign, rather than taking the thrust of it."
Green Party TD, Dan Boyle strongly defended the referendum system. He said that the problems of communicating Europe were entrenched by the notion that people are always represented by their own politicians. "I think experience has shown that when people are asked about Europe, they tend to vote for a slowing down of the project. If 90 per cent of politicians are in favour of the EU project, we should ask serious questions about why 40 percent of the electorate routinely votes No." Deputy Boyle believed that the lack of a common mechanism for deciding an issue remained the strongest impediment to a common reflection of people's wishes.
The Forum session was held against the background of the EuropeWeek 2005 activities taking place in Galway at the same time.
National Forum On Europe, Fóram Náisiúnta um an Eoraip © 2010