Shane Ross (Independent)

It is not too early. The Minister of State should have thought of it six months ago. It seemed to have been an impossibility to the political parties that this treaty would have been beaten. So arrogant and disconnected had they become, which they admit, that they never conceived that there would be a situation like this. We are bankrupt of ideas about it. That is a terrible reflection on the body politic here. It is also a terrible reflection of the people and the institutions the Minister of State listed. I do not welcome the fact that he said that the Government had the support of all the political parties. He went on to say that it had the support of ICTU, IBEC, the chambers of commerce, the IFA, ICMSA and all those other bodies. What does that tell us about these institutions? It is not only that they are in the Government's pocket but that these people are also out of touch with public opinion and that there is a lovely club at the top whose members all combine when there are issues of this sort to ram through. It did not succeed and it does not succeed in Europe.

What I am appalled at more than anything else is the dismissive way that people say we will be able to satisfy a few of the objections and then we will get it through another referendum. I thought that Senator Ormonde was doing extraordinarily well when she said it was a victory for democracy until she started talking about how she met people at the doorstep and explained to them time and again what the treaty was about and they still voted "No" because they did not understand it. That is so patronising. Of course, they understood it. They listened to her, as I often do, and voted the opposite way. People are entitled to do that in this House as are those the Senator meets at the doorsteps. They understood the treaty just as well as those on the "Yes" side. To suggest that the people on the "No" side did not know as much as people on the "Yes" side is patronising and wrong. It is symptomatic of the attitude of the "Yes" side to this campaign.

I wish to turn to an issue on which I found a defining reason for voting "No", that is the issue of tax. Every time I came forward with this issue I was patronised by Ministers who said, "Do not worry, there is unanimity about it; we will be able to put down the veto and that will be the end of it". There is unanimity apparently about this treaty, yet we are told it is will be ratified anyway. Where is the unanimity in that? If there was unanimity about this, the Lisbon treaty would be dead.

I would thank the Minister of State if he would listen to me on this matter. I do not believe for one moment — it is a legitimate belief and neither he nor I can prove whether it is true — that the Government would ever have used its veto on tax because it would not have felt capable, courageous or strong enough to do that. What was to happen now and next week was that all the initiatives on tax were to be buried by the French particularly, and the Minister of State knows that. Last week the French Minister for Finance let it slip in an interview with Le Monde that the top of their agenda was tax harmonisation. What does that mean? If they thought the Irish veto was going to work, they would not bother their barney coming forward with tax harmonisation. Tax harmonisation was on the agenda, it was going to be used and forced through. The Government would never have used its veto. Instead, it would have threatened to use it only for France, Germany and some of the other large member states to make clear their intention to punish us in some other way for taking that course. We would have been told, for example, that the €200 million already allocated to the national development programme was no more. In those circumstances, the Government would have withdrawn its veto and obtained concessions elsewhere. That would have been the end of it. The Minister of State can shake his head as much as he likes but he must take these points seriously. One of the problems with the Government's campaign was that he refused to do so. It is legitimate to express a lack of confidence that the Government would use its veto on tax.

It is my job as a public representative to ask the Minister of State to go back to Europe to demand confirmation, before we sign this treaty, that we have the right to set our own corporation tax rate and manage our own tax affairs. That must be written in stone as of 2008 or 2009 rather than in some future treaty which nobody believes will be effective.