Myopic viewpoint of Ireland misguided

I am writing in response to the column, “Perversity of Irish voters scrutinized,” by Gwynne Dyer (BDN, June 12). Having just returned from a three-week visit with relatives and friends in Ireland, I have a considerably different view of the so-called “perversity of Irish voters” than those expressed by Dyer. He is, after all, based in London and expresses an alarmingly myopic view from across the channel.

If Dyer had given even a little attention to the Irish media he might have presented a more balanced picture in his column. The Irish vote on the Nice Treaty was “no,” but according to Dyer the reasons “were mostly not about the treaty at all.” He writes, “there were just not enough Irish voters who believed that the generosity [that] was once shown to them should now be shown to Poles and Bulgarians.” In truth the Irish have the highest per capita spending in Europe for charitable causes and it is a serious error to imply a lack of generosity as a motive for voting no on the Nice Treaty.

A much more cogent reason is that the Treaty of Nice would require the Irish to give up their neutral status since they would become part of NATO’s Partnership for Peace and the Rapid Reaction Force. For many Irish who have tried to maintain a neutral stance on international issues a yes vote would mean that they would have little say in European military deployments, even though their own forces would be included.

Another reason that the Nice Treaty was defeated in the Irish referendum is that Ireland’s Catholics believe that new EU regulations would allow Ireland to be flooded with pornography and they would have little say on the matter. Catholic newspapers were adamantly opposed to the Nice Treaty based on this issue as well as the issue of abortion. The Catholic hierarchy especially feels that the country would lose their autonomy to make their own decisions on these matters.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the reasons that most voters were against the Nice Treaty it should at least be made clear that these are the real concerns and that Dyer’s slanted explanations tell more about his mindset than the Irish mindset. In three weeks of reading local and nationally circulated newspapers in Ireland prior to the referendum, I did not see any article giving forth reasons similar to his for defeating the referendum.

Dyer continued his column with some comments on Northern Ireland elections and made the curious assertion that “the essence of the Good Friday peace agreement was that the IRA would end its failed 30-year campaign to bomb the North into union with the republic in return for ‘power sharing’ arrangements that would let it [the IRA] claim that it had not really been defeated.” It seems to me that the IRA was, in fact, quite successful since the peace agreement would never have occurred without the efforts of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, which used fasting unto death as well as violence as extreme methods to gain their ends.

On June 7 four Sinn Fein politicians were elected as Members of the British Parliament, so we have here a recent example that the IRA’s methods were not defeated but, in fact, successful at gaining the sympathy of the nationalist population.

It is an unfortunate truth that without the violence of the Easter Rising in 1916 there would never have been a republic freed of British rule. It is also an unfortunate truth that there would never have been a Good Friday Peace Treaty without the violence of the unionist extremists and the IRA. It was only because Sinn Fein agreed to the peace treaty that there was any chance of it succeeding, and not, as Dyer asserts, that it was “only diffidently backed by the IRA’s front organization, Sinn Fein. …”

Dyer finishes his partisan column by stating that “Ireland is a lot farther from the mainland of Europe than the map suggests.” He seems to forget that Ireland is adopting the euro as its monetary standard and gradually withdrawing Irish money from circulation beginning this January whereas Britain continues to vacillate on the adoption of the euro.

The truth is that there is a considerable faction of Thatcherites that is bitterly opposed to closer links with the European Union, so Dyer only has to look over his own shoulder to see who is “farther from the mainland of Europe.”

Hugh Curran of Surry teaches courses in the Peace Studies Program at the University of Maine. He is also a co-director of Emmaus Center, a homeless shelter in Down East Maine.