I want the Irish people to vote yes to the Maastricht Treaty on the basis of a calm assessment of their own best interests and not on the basis of fear or greed induced by exaggerations by Government politicians. I do not argue that our people should vote for the Maastricht Treaty because of a proffered bribe of £6 billion. I do not know whether we will get all that money from Europe. At present Britain and Germany are heading for large budget deficits and there may be difficulty raising that money. We already get three or four times as much money from Europe per head of population as the inhabitants of East Germany whose income per head is not much greater than ours. Of course, I hope that we will get this £6 billion but we should not make wild promises about it. Nor do I argue that we should vote for the Maastricht Treaty because our whole world will collapse if we do not. No one can foresee the future with sufficient clarity to say that one way or the other.
I argue that we should vote for the Maastricht Treaty on the basis of the calculated and balanced judgment that, first, a united and inter-dependent Europe will be a more peaceful place than a divided Europe and second, a single European currency will make it easier for a trading nation like Ireland to grow and provide jobs for its people than would otherwise be the case. If Ireland stays out of the single currency Irish interest rates will definitely go up because a great deal of the German money now invested in the Irish gilts market will simply be removed. Third, a strong central European authority is needed to control transboundary pollution, unfair competition between rich and poor countries and exploitation of strength of any kind by big countries at the expense of small ones like Ireland. Fourth, the Maastricht Treaty is only a logical extension of policies Ireland has pursued since 1956 of deliberately opening up its economy to external influences; the Maastricht Treaty is no more than a logical extension of that. Fifth, on balance, we are more likely to get financial aid from Europe to remedy our economic weaknesses if we are, so to speak, full members of the European club rather than pavilion members, as the opponents of Maastricht would have it. Sixth, as full members of a multicultural Europe, our culture will flourish, our horizons will expand and our self-confidence will grow.
As I said elsewhere, if Ireland were to gain an extra half of 1 per cent of the European market we could solve our unemployment problem. When it is put like that it does not seem an impossible task. The European Single Market of 344 million consumers will be formally inaugurated at the Edinburgh Summit in December of this year. That Single Market, which the Irish people fully support, will not work unless it is underpinned by the further steps proposed in the Maastricht Treaty. Those steps — a single currency, common economic policies, stronger law enforcement powers for the Commission, new cohesion policies and common defence and security policies — must be taken if the Single Market is to be robust enough to survive even a modest economic crisis. I ask Members to pause for a moment to think about that.
How could a Single Market without customs posts, tariffs and subsidies last if individual countries were able, for example, to competitively devalue their currencies, which they will be able to do if the Maastricht Treaty is not approved, print money to pay their bills, which they will be able to do if the Maastricht Treaty is not approved, give unfair subsidies to their local authorities, which they will be able to do if the Maastricht Treaty is not approved, or pursue conflicting defence and security policies? Without the Maastricht Treaty the Single Market would not survive more than a year or two. It does not take much imagination to see that without the Maastricht Treaty the Single Market would quickly revert to a series of competing national economic blocs. The Single Market, the Cohesion Fund and the single European currency are a huge opportunity for Ireland, an opportunity to solve our employment crisis. However, it is only an opportunity; it is not a guarantee. We can fail to grasp that opportunity.
I do not believe that the Government, or at least the Fianna Fáil component of it, have the right mental attitude to Europe or domestic policy-making to be able to grasp that opportunity to the full. I am not talking here about superficial errors or minor incompetencies. I believe that the Fianna Fáil Party have an ingrained attitude to Europe and domestic policy-making which will lead this country up a blind alley. So far as Europe is concerned, the Fianna Fáil Party are simply unable to think in European terms, to place a problem in a European context and solve it in that context. They still think of Europe as somewhere out there, a place where we go to get money, plead for special treatment or complain. Europe is seen as a sort of surrogate colonial power to whom we have handed over part of the responsibility for our lives. In reality, Europe is no such thing: Europe is ourselves.
I wish to illustrate how this neo-colonial dependency attitude — I wish to stress that it is an unconscious attitude — leads the Fianna Fáil Party into very practical day-to-day mistakes. Take the Common Agricultural Policy reform for example. Everyone knows we have to cut surpluses and costs. Everyone knows that Ireland could have more to lose than any other country if this is done in the wrong way. Radical proposals have been put forward by the Commission which will cost Ireland thousands of jobs if they go through. What do our Government do? In the manner of a sensitive colonial, they look for exceptions and exemptions all based on an appeal for poor little Ireland. That is not the way to solve the problem. A different Government would have looked at the problem of the Common Agricultural Policy reform in a European context rather than a narrow Irish context. By changing the context they would have found a solution and, therefore, have the confidence to put forward a genuine alternative, an Irish-European alternative, to the MacSharry plan. In a recent speech I sketched out how Ireland could have forged a political alliance with environmental interests in Europe which would have created a genuine commercial future and not a hand-out for grass-based Irish farming, without exceptions or exemptions of any kind, or looking for sympathy from Europe. However, Fianna Fáil would not come up with that idea, not because they do not want to but because they simply do not think in European terms.
I wish to cite another example. The way the Taoiseach has tried to sell the Maastricht Treaty to the people again demonstrates Fianna Fáil's chronic inability to see problems in a European context. Instead of selling the Irish people a vision of peace in Europe, extra growth for Europe and thus extra markets for Ireland, he tries to present the Treaty as some sort of massive £6 billion bribe for the Irish people from their European fairy godmother if only they promise to be good and vote the right way on 18 June. The same attitude comes through in regard to European unity and defence. Instead of seeing that it is in Ireland's interest to have some control, through common European defence policies, of the effect of what happens in Europe on our destiny, Fianna Fáil again look for exceptions and exemptions of one kind or another. They want to slow down the process and freeload on other people's efforts.
The same duality of thought is carried through by Fianna Fáil into domestic policy making. Domestic policy making under the Fianna Fáil Party is not up to the challenge of a European market of 344 million consumers. There is no better illustration of the error of having a party in Government who have no interest in policy and who let the Civil Service do their thinking for them than the Finance Bill, which has been referred to a special committee and which has an intimate effect on how we succeed in the Single Market. The Culliton report is quite blunt about it. It says: "In no other single area does the Government have at its disposal the tools to make a far reaching and effective reform to support enterprise as in taxation". Yet the printers' ink on those words in the Culliton report was hardly dry when the Government introduced a Finance Bill to do precisely the opposite of what Culliton had recommended. It was a Finance Bill to cut tax concessions for employee ownership and risk investment in manufacturing and, incredibly, to offer a 10 per cent income tax rate to people who leave money of up to £100,000 lying dormant in a bank account and to offer new concessions that never existed before in Irish law on capital gains tax on the sale of development land. Could one imagine a Finance Bill more contrary to the Culliton report than this one? Culliton says that we should reward effort, risk-taking and enterprise. The Finance Bill states that we should reward people who leave money lying in banks and who acquire property and sell it at the right price after somebody else has developed it. The tragic fact is that the Government genuinely do not see any contradiction in this. They believe in leaving the Finance Bill to the civil servants as long as the members of the Cabinet can get on with important matters such as dividing up the lottery funds between the constituencies, which is the real stuff of politics as far as they are concerned.
The Maastricht Treaty gives us the chance to increase our market share, a chance to create extra jobs. It guarantees us nothing. It simply gives us an opportunity. It will depend on our own decisions as to whether we take that opportunity. That is why I do not believe that a Fianna Fáil led Government is the best one to ensure that Ireland gets full benefit from European Union and the Maastricht Treaty.
The Government parties should, of course, have dealt with travel and information rights before the Maastricht referendum. They have decided not to, and as they have a majority in the Dáil, we must make the best of that foolish decision, rash and unnecessary though it may be.
I believe that the Solemn Declaration now strictly binds the present Irish Government to introducing a constitutional amendment to deal with travel and information issues. This is not now a domestic matter, but an international commitment given by the Government to the other member states. The wording of the proposed Protocol which we were prepared to put into constitutional law is already available, as is the Fine Gael alternative. I do not understand, therefore, why the Government cannot publish a constitutional amendment Bill based on one or other of these texts. It would greatly reassure people, if this were done in advance of the Maastricht referendum. The Government have the Dáil majority to pass such a Bill, and there is absolutely no need, other than irresponsibility, to postpone it until November.
We must come to deal in due time with all the broader issues arising from the Supreme Court judgment in a compassionate and considered way. We do not need a debate in which people take up "sides" around some artificial legalistic formula. This is an issue on which Dáil Éireann should act, for once, as a genuine legislature. All Members must be allowed to tease out the alternatives in an open, honest and free way, without the constraint imposed by any artificial consensus imposed from any quarter. Dáil Éireann, when that time comes, should be a place for listening as well as for talking. The public should trust their TDs on this issue. They will have a chance to judge them anyway within the next 18 months. In the meantime, Deputies should be trusted on that issue and, as a nation, we should deal with the Maastricht Treaty on its merits unclouded by other concerns.
I say we should vote "Yes" because the Maastricht Treaty is a stepping stone — to use the words of Michael Collins — to something much greater. We should not be afraid to sketch out our long term vision for Europe. My vision is of a Europe with a genuine federal budget, automatic transfers from richer to poorer regions, an elected European Senate on the US model, with equal representation for Ireland and Germany, to protect smaller states, and a democratically accountable European Government elected by the European Parliament which would have democratic accountability for economic policy.
I would like to see the competences of this new European Government and Parliament distinguished from those of national governments and parliaments in a simple and clear European constitution. Nobody can claim that the Maastricht Treaty is simple or clear. There is a great deal of overlap between European and national responsibilities at the moment and that will continue under Maastricht. Everybody's business tends to become nobody's business.
When considering proposals to spend taxpayers' money the first question people ask is whether there is a grant from Brussels. That has often become a much more important question than whether it is worth while spending the money anyway. If we had an automatic European financial transfer system similar to the one operating between the German Laander in the Federal Republic, where a block of money was given to the poor state to use as they saw fit rather than on individual schemes, that would not arise. We would spend the money in the best way possible without having to ask whether a grant is available. My main criticism of the Delors II package is that it is much too conservative in its federal vision of the new Europe.
There is also the problem that under the existing structure there will be no clear accountability for economic policy. National governments will not be completely free agents as far as economic policy-making is concerned. National central banks will be part of the European network of central banks, but where will accountability lie for those decisions? If accountability for economic policy-making in Europe is difficult to pin down and if an economic crisis arises, tension could build up uncontrollably. It is accountability of an individual, perhaps unfair in some cases to that individual, that relieves tension in a political system. Economic policy decision-making is now so diffused in Europe that it will be very difficult to say who is responsible. Therefore, if a crisis arises it could be a real crisis.
If the Maastricht Treaty is rejected, there will be no federal vision at all. We will revert to a Europe of nation states. The European Community will not, of course, disappear. It will continue, much as the Council of Europe has continued over 40 years in a sort of half-life, but the main business will be transacted elsewhere.
Those who reject the Maastricht Treaty because of concern about its defence implications should think about the alternative. It was the Europe of nation states that gave us the Second World War, the First World War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Austro-Prussian War and the Napoleonic Wars.
Given the modern technologies of war, and Ireland's vulnerable but strategic position in the North Atlantic, does anyone seriously believe that a proclamation of unarmed neutrality would protect us from a war that might break out between the nation states of continental Europe if that were allowed to happen by rejecting Maastricht? One has only to look at conflicting positions that were brewing about Yugoslavia, and at the growth of the xenophobic right-wing vote in Flanders, Germany and France, to see that the raw materials of conflict are still lying around. We could not escape the consequences of that.
I consider that the best way to defend Ireland from attack is for Irish statesmen to be working at the heart of Europe, within a European union that has the political, economic and defensive strength to keep the peace. The present Government should have had the honesty to say that clearly in the White Paper. The position they have adopted in the White Paper, wherein they say they are willing to delegate the defence interests of Ireland to a body of which we are not even a member — the Western European Union — in order to maintain what they call the "specific character of Ireland's security and defence policies outside military alliances", is very difficult for anyone to understand. In fact, by preventing a genuine European Union from developing its own defence competence, the Irish Government are artificially prolonging the relevance of NATO, although this is hardly their intention.
The Maastricht Treaty has nothing to do with conscription. It involves — we should face this now rather than wait until 1996 — a long term political commitment by member states to co-ordinate their defence policies. Whether states rely on an all-volunteer army to do this, will be a matter for their own sole decision. Indeed, modern defence systems make the whole idea of conscription out of date and irrelevant. Those states which retain it, do so for reasons of social solidarity and political intertia rather than for reasons of defensive necessity.
The Maastricht Treaty affords us an opportunity to move beyond traditional nationalism. The nation state was a necessary stage in the development of stable political structures. However, it has its limitations. It is plain that traditional nationalist formulae have not enabled us for the last 150 years to solve the problem of the relationship between the two communities on this island.
I speak of constitutional nationalism as well as the other variety — neither have succeeded in solving that problem once they stayed within those territorial parameters. Traditional Nationalist formulae have prevented us from solving what is inherently a very soluble problem — that is how we and the Unionist community can get on with each other on this island. The development of European federalism gives us a chance to restate the Irish problem in an entirely different context — the European context of federalism and of subsidiarity, of shared and overlapping sovereignties rather than unitary sovereignties based on a single territory and thus by changing the context solving the problem. By restating the problem, as Jean Monnet restated the problem of how Europe could get on after the last war, we can solve the problem in Ireland. I believe we should redefine Article 2 and 3 of our Constitution in that European context. It makes no sense that ours is the only Constitution of any member of the Twelve voting on the Maastricht Treaty that contains a territorial claim on territory in Europe that we do not already administer. Let us rethink those Articles fundamentally on the basis of the new European concepts of different peoples, with different cultures sharing the same physical and economic space. If we restate the problem in that context there is no reason why we in this generation cannot solve it.
At a practical level it has been estimated that enhanced economic integration between North and South on this island could create up to 75,000 extra jobs. The Maastricht Treaty creates the context in which this can be done.
Let me now turn to economics. Opponents of the Maastricht Treaty say that Ireland should first be allowed to "catch up" with other countries before joining the single currency area. The assumption is that continued freedom to devalue our own currency would enable us to catch up more rapidly than we would within a single currency area. This is a mistake. Most small European countries that are not in the European Community now realise that linkage to a big currency is essential to the encouragement of inward investment and the credible control of inflation. I believe that even if we reject Maastricht, we will still have to maintain the fixed Deutsche Mark link for our currency. If that is so, it is much better for us to have some control on the monetary policies underpinning that currency union, through membership of the board of the European Central Bank, rather than be sitting on the outside, accepting what ever interest rate policy has been accepted by the German Central Bank.
I accept the argument of some opponents to Maastricht that the budget proposed by the European Community is too small to underpin a genuine federal budget. As I said already, I favour an automatic transfer system within a much larger European budget but if we reject the Maastricht Treaty we will never achieve an enlarged European budget if we accept the Maastricht Treaty, there is some chance we will. The best way for Ireland to exercise its political leverage in this area is at the time of enlargement of Community membership. We can veto enlargement if we wish to and that is the stage which we should insist on a genuine federal budgetary system. We should, not, however, reject Maastricht because this is the wrong time to exercise political leverage.
