EU flags outside the European parliament in Brussels. The View
Martin Mansergh
January may be the beginning of a new year. Mostly, it feels like a return to base camp, with life stripped back to its essentials and nature relatively bare. It is a month to be endured. Warmth is comfort; coldness and damp is living in misery.
January also tends to be characterised disproportionately by the disappearance of familiar figures.
The late Paddy Harte, former Fine Gael TD, will be remembered for his cross-border and cross-community initiative with Glen Barr of the Derry UDA, in creating with a young mixed workforce the Island of Ireland Peace Park at Messines with its distinctive Round Tower, opened by President McAleese, Queen Elizabeth, and the King of the Belgians in November 1998. The battle of Messines in 1917 saw Ulster and Irish regiments fight alongside each other during a devastating war that left few communities in Ireland unscathed.
Another disappearance was that of Maurice Hayes, one of the first Catholic top civil servants in Northern Ireland, of a similar mould to Ken Whitaker, also from Co. Down, who headed the civil service in the Republic during the Lemass era. Few people made as big an impact post-retirement as Maurice Hayes.
He served in the Patten Commission on the reform of policing, which paved the way for the creation of the PSNI and its subsequent acceptance across the community. He brought comparative experience to bear with wisdom during 10 years in the Senate, and he also expertly chaired the Forum for Europe in the early 2000s.
Long-term future
The European Union will continue to require our close attention, not just in terms of the immediate challenges of negotiating Brexit, but because it represents, as far as Ireland as a state is concerned, our long-term future.
There is no doubting the Catholic values that went into the making of the EU, with Europe as a concept appearing in letters of 600 and 613 AD from St Columbanus to Pope Gregory the Great and his successor. The principle of subsidiarity in the EU Treaties comes straight from papal encyclicals. Social partnership, integral to the EU, is sometimes denigrated as neo-corporatism, but unlike the alleged original is an adjunct to democracy, not a possible alternative to it.
Every Pope, without interfering in politics, has discreetly supported European unity. Through his impact on his native Poland, Pope John Paul II made a direct contribution to it, and to ending the partition of Europe. He also provided an answer to Stalin’s derisive question: “How many divisions has the Pope?”
As referendum campaigns here, whether on EU Treaties or moral issues, have shown, a section of Irish Catholic opinion is deeply distrustful of the EU, where, of course, the Church’s writ does not run. One fear was that the EU, or the European Court of Human Rights under the Council of Europe, would try to impose norms in relation to abortion or other moral issues against the will of a majority here.
At this stage, the pressure for change, yet to be measured in a referendum to remove or negate the pro-life amendment in the Constitution later this year, comes from within. Any outside forces seeking to influence public opinion seem more likely, as in 2015, to come from the other side of the Atlantic than from Europe.
One difficulty in forecasting future EU developments is the absence of a single centre of authority. There are many senior figures, Presidents of the Commission, Council, Parliament, European Central Bank, individual heads of government, and so on, none of whom are in a position on their own to determine the future. Bold plans and visions, if they survive at all, tend to be heavily watered down, and appear only in moderate form after negotiation, compromise and decision.
Defeated German chancellor-candidate and former president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, who could be German Vice-Chancellor if negotiations for a grand coalition succeed, created waves a few weeks ago, when he called for a United States of Europe by 2025.
This received a negative reception in Germany, the Bavarian CSU leader describing it as utopian. The political head of the German chancellery under Merkel called the target date wholly unrealistic and doubted it would happen in our lifetimes, adding: “The majority of our citizens in nearly all member States do not want sovereignty to reside in a Brussels centralised state.”
While Brexit supporters and EU critics here love to highlight such threats, they are not to be taken seriously for two reasons. Germany has no intention of substantially enlarging the EU budget, currently around 1% of GDP, and is determined that the EU will not become a transfer union.
Secondly, France has no intention of surrendering its permanent UN Security Council seat to the EU, even if President Macron views the EU as “the instrument of our power and sovereignty”.
Perceived threats to territorial integrity in Eastern Europe mean that countries there still need continued American protection through NATO. Limited and voluntary participation in European security policy, to combat international terrorism and to support UN-delegated peacekeeping tasks, is consistent with our tradition of positive neutrality. This is no time to distance ourselves from our EU partners, when they have shown strong solidarity with us over Brexit.
Challenges
As British Prime Minister David Cameron discovered when he failed to stop the fiscal compact treaty, individual countries on their own do not have vetoes that cannot be circumvented. Regardless of further challenges to our corporate tax position, well defended to date over a long period, there are no foreseeable circumstances in which it could be to our advantage to leave the EU and to revert to greater dependence on the UK.
The disappearance of Peter Sutherland reminded us of some advantages to globalisation, of which Ireland is a net beneficiary, and of two of his great achievements, the democratisation of air travel and the Erasmus Scheme, encouraging university student exchanges across Europe. The EU is neither the neo-liberal nor the statist monster conjured up by its critics.