Alex White (Dublin South, Labour)

Giving my colleague, Deputy Boyd Barrett, the benefit of the doubt a few minutes ago with the question of whether he was "paranoid", to use his own word, I am nevertheless coming quickly to the conclusion that he is paranoid. He has constantly used variations of the word "dictate" in arguing the Commission is "dictating" matters. That has never been the pattern of our experience in the European Union. In every referendum debate for as long as I remember, it was always argued that because we were a small country, we would be overruled, lose out, pushed aside and our voice would not be heard. When has that occurred? I ask the colleagues opposite or anybody else to help me with an example of any time in the past 40 years when Ireland's interests, argued and articulated by the Government and representatives in Europe, were defeated, excluded and overridden. When did this happen?

The only way such a question can be met is with silence because it has never occurred. The constant playing with words like "dictate" in reference to the Commission is wrong. It may interest Deputy Boyd Barrett and others to know that the people in the Commission are people not all that different from him and me. Generally speaking, they are reasonably intelligent and well informed. We can either agree or disagree with them. The notion that we will be the victims of some pattern of interest being overridden by these people is infantile. I am not saying everything will be plain sailing and that everything that an Irish Minister or representative argues in Brussels will necessarily win through.

This is a process and not a question of being dictated to. People should grow up and understand how these processes come about. It would be great to have some of the people involved in this argument getting stuck into some of these discussions and gaining experience in fighting for Ireland's interests rather than constantly arguing that the Europeans will dictate to us and do us down. It can be frustrating to hear such arguments and it is misleading the people, as they do not tally with past experience.

The Tánaiste can correct me but my understanding is that if the people pass the referendum, they will have agreed to put existing rules into the domestic law of the State. Deputy Murphy argued that the rules would be inserted into the Constitution at the insistence of Chancellor Merkel but that is wrong. I do not know any more about the debate which took place other than what I read in the newspapers but as I understand it there was an argument that the debt brake and deficit rules should be put into the constitutions of the various countries. That was not agreed in the end and instead there was a consensus that the rules would "take effect in the national law of the Contracting Parties at the latest one year after the entry into force of this Treaty through provisions of binding force and permanent character, preferably constitutional, or otherwise guaranteed to be fully respected and adhered to throughout the national budgetary processes". I understand that to be a compromise and that form of words was reached in circumstances where people were not willing to put the details of a debt brake and deficit rules into the Constitution.

I would have objected to such a process of involving deficit rules and debt brakes into our Constitution as they do not belong there. They will not be inserted into it. If the people vote "Yes" in this referendum, there will be a permissive provision inserted into the Constitution allowing the Oireachtas to introduce legislation to domestic law. That can be debated in this House and passed or otherwise by the democratically elected Members of these Houses.

With all the talk of being dictated to and excluding parliaments, we should consider paragraph 2 of Article 3, which is arguably the most important article in the treaty. It refers to how the rules would have to take effect in national law. There is reference to the contracting parties putting in place at national level a correction mechanism. The final paragraph states that such correction mechanisms "shall fully respect the prerogatives of national parliaments". This sentence is ignored because it does not suit Deputies Richard Boyd Barrett and Catherine Murphy. Selective quotation of the treaty is wrong.

On the role of the European Commission, the document is replete with references to matters such as country specific measures being agreed by the Commission and refers to a timeframe being agreed with countries. This is not a process of dictation.

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