David Norris (Independent)

The Minister of State is welcome to the House. I will comment briefly on his speech. He spoke about the interest in the Euro barometer. We would have been very interested if those in Europe had not stifled it for the past six months and refused to ask questions about the response to the treaty. Why did they do that? Why did they muzzle their own Euro barometer?

There is an issue of trust regarding politicians and the issues raised. I will answer the question in that regard. The Minister of State spoke about a setback. Since when was the exercise of a democratic vote a setback? There may have been a certain situation created in Europe but it is not a problem of the making of the Irish people; it is a problem endemic to the entire institution. The Minister of State said there is a need to reconnect the Union with the citizen. That is right. He said there is a need in particular for the Union to speak to all of its citizens in language that they can relate to and to consign to the bin the jargon, the special language and terminologies that exclude people. I fully agree, but was that what those in Europe were doing?

Senator Ormonde correctly asked if people trust politicians. Perhaps they do not, but it is not confined merely, exclusively or even principally to the politicians of Ireland. Why should anybody trust people who, like President Nicolas Sarkozy, said of the treaty that if one opens the toolbox lid, one will see all the same tools, that it is just a cosmetic job and that it has been repackaged? I put on the record of this House what another person said about the treaty some months ago and this is one of the reasons I voted against it. I am delighted we defeated the treaty because these people now have to reconsider their position with regard to a major issue for democracy. Mr. Giscard d'Estang said of the treaty that:

Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly . . . All the earlier proposals will be in the next text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.

How does that square with what the Minister of State said about openness and easily accessible language? Mr. Karel De Gucht, the Belgian Foreign Minister, said in June 2007 said, "The aim of the Constitutional Treaty was to be more readable: the aim of this treaty is to be unreadable". How does that square with anything the Minister of State said or with the context of the questions that were properly addressed by Senator Ormonde?

Those in Europe promoted the European constitution, but it failed in a series of countries. They would have liked to have punched the individual citizens in those countries because there is a two-tier, two-speed system in Europe. There is the speed at which the meglocrats — the bully boys — in Brussels want to go and there is a speed at which the ordinary people of Europe want to go. Those in Europe dare not risk this again. When they ran this new painted cosmeticised toolbox, the people in most of the countries, except Ireland, were not permitted to vote and we were the people who voted against it.

I consider myself a good European. I always voted for the treaties, but I got increasingly disenchanted by the insulting language that was being used. I listened to one such person on a radio programme today, a German MEP blackguarding Commissioner Charlie McCreevy and saying he should be fired because he was off gambling on horses when he should have been in the Parliament. A German person of any kind should be very careful about racial tinges. He said that he had to use the translation system when Commissioner McCreevy spoke because he spoke English so badly. How dare these people treat us in this way? They talk about money being returned but we got nothing to which we were not entitled. We gave our fishing stocks. We have employed hundreds of thousands of European people. We have been pretty good to Europe, as Europe has been good to us.

I hope the Minister of State will take this point back to Government. The principal reason I opposed the treaty was my concerns about neutrality. I am not a naive nincompoop, I know that Fianna Fáil has no commitment to it. DeValera was pragmatic about it and sold out to the Six Counties. Fine Gael is perfectly honest about it; it has no interest in it and it would like to walk us into NATO. I am glad that as a result of the "No" vote we have not institutionalised the European Defence Agency, which was the old European armaments group.

The problem for the Minister of State and for politicians generally is that the main political parties have no principled loyalty to neutrality, but the Irish people do. How do those parties gull them once again? I say this in the context of the prevarication and queasy evasion of this Government and its predecessor about the subject of extraordinary rendition. I gave the registration number of a plane on this morning's Order of Business that was last seen in Guantanamo Bay and that is now in Shannon. These are reasons for this vote — neutrality renegotiated, the expansion of the Petersberg Tasks to allow us to intervene in a third country on suspicion of terrorism — that is the way to Iraq. I oppose it. If the Minister of State gets a protocol about these issues, I will be out voting "Yes" and campaigning for a "Yes" vote.