Our eminent leaders Bertie and co are seeing JFK’s famous exhortation ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country’, rather uncomfortably reversed in the case of the Lisbon Treaty.

Dick Roche, Ireland’s European Affairs head honcho, says ‘there is no plan B for the treaty’, so this is very much an ‘Ask not what the EU can do for your country. Ask what your country can do for the EU’ type of moment. If Ireland doesn’t ratify the treaty, says Roche, it will be ‘dead’. He also said that it would mean that Ireland would be ‘throwing away all the goodwill that we have amassed in the EU over the years for no benefit.’

Dear me, but the EU and its treaties and constitutions prompt the most blatant hypocrisy from politicians of all stripes. This business about throwing away goodwill puts me in mind of Vladimir Putin’s recent encouragement to the people of Russia not to throw away the country’s delicate stability by failing to turn out in droves to vote for Mr Putin’s anointed successor Dmitri Medvedev (who duly won with a stability-maintaining 70% of the vote, of course).

Both Putin’s and Roche’s appeals to the people narrow complex voting issues down to one emotive cry; they tell voters they have a choice but try to guilt trip responsible voters into the idea that the right choice is clear.

It’s very disappointing to hear Roche deny the existence of a plan B regarding the Lisbon Treaty and saying that the Treaty will only be voted on once. So no chance that if we don’t vote the right way the Government will be kind enough to give us a second stab, as they did when we got a little bit muddled over the Nice Treaty in 2001? Shame. 

It’s not just foreign, faraway places like Russia that sometimes make a mockery of democracy, is it?

Of course one of the main things that let the Government off the hook second time round on the Nice Treaty was the fact that they’d secured Ireland’s neutrality within the EU.

Wherever one might stand on the issue of Ireland’s neutrality, surely the hypocrisy of Sinn Fein’s constant championing of it grates and chafes? I don’t think I need to labour the point here: Sinn Fein banging on about their commitment to neutrality is like Bertie encouraging people to fill in their tax returns on time.

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!