Liam Twomey (Fine Gael)

I welcome this debate on a section of the reform treaty which has not yet been discussed in great depth. Most of the European treaties on which we have held referendums have focused on economic issues. Greater emphasis should be placed on the importance of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the most important part of the Lisbon treaty. Although the text is primarily focused on economic issues, people have grown accustomed to economic matters and are sufficiently mature to deal with them. They are not convinced by the wild arguments being made by the "No" side when they set out economic reasons for voting against the treaty. They have moved far beyond these arguments.

In the coming days, we must highlight that the Charter of Fundamental Rights affords a range of rights to every Irish and European citizen. This is the best argument in favour of the reform treaty and I am surprised the media have not focused on it. The charter is the most radical change in the treaty.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights does not aspire to afford all European Union citizens a set of rights but will, if we pass the treaty, become a legal document providing new rights to citizens. The importance of the role of Europe in protecting citizens' rights was highlighted to me by the case of a lady who, on failing to secure timely access to health care in the United Kingdom, took the national health service, the largest employer to the world, to the European Court of Justice. She took on the British Government and NHS and succeeded in having her rights enumerated by the court.

When so-called left-wing groups claiming to campaign on social grounds oppose the Lisbon reform treaty, which will give legal effect to aspirations to secure rights, it calls into question their ideology and reasons for opposing the charter. If they read the judgments of the European Court of Justice over the past 30 years, they would see how difficult it is for citizens to secure their rights at national level. One must exhaust national court systems before one can take a case to the European Court of Justice. The charter will make it much easier to have one's rights protected.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights sets out rights in areas such as employment, health care, education and citizenship. I believe it will be developed in the years ahead and become extremely important to those on the margins of society who believe they cannot take on the system. If the ECJ has demonstrated anything in recent years, it is that it allows individual citizens to take on large corporations and state organisations. Any left-wing group which claims to have a social conscience is a disgrace if it opposes this part of the Lisbon treaty. The same cannot be said of groups with a more fundamentalist right-wing approach. Organisations such as Libertas cannot make up their minds on economic matters and produce crazy arguments to attack what they consider to be an excessive number of rights for ordinary people.

The treaty appeals to the majority of people, the great bulk in the middle who do not belong to the far left or right. It appeals to those who want everyone, whether here or in the rest of Europe, to be given a fair chance. This is the essence of the treaty and the issue on which the debate should focus. As I stated in the House last week, we should focus on the Charter of Fundamental Rights because people will become confused about many aspects of the treaty, including economic provisions. The most important point is that the charter is not aspirational. This is not a case of saying it would be nice and woolly if we had something like this. This will be the law, the foundation of people's rights in the EU for the next 40 years.

There are groups that would rather see us throw this away. If anyone ever felt they had a grievance with this State in the next 30 years, he or she would have to go through the tortuous and expensive process of getting justice through the European Court of Justice. That could be denied to them because some group feels the charter should not be made law. We should all talk about this and Ministers, from the Taoiseach down, should emphasise the importance of this. It will not bind people.

It is in the interests of certain groups such as Libertas to pander to a right-wing, fundamentalist view-point to scare people into thinking we are giving too many rights to people. This is how some people think but the charter does nothing of the sort. It makes it easy to prevent people being exploited and to ensure people have access to services that all of us take for granted. Those who are lucky enough to have an education, experience and contacts can get these things already. That is what is important about this. I ask the Minister of State and other Ministers to put the focus on the Charter of Fundamental Rights and make it an emphasis for the next few days.

The economic arguments have been won and it is time to move onto the social side of what the EU is about.