Within But Without: Ireland and the EU

For a while in my early days in school, it seemed that Europe was very important indeed. On the back of all our school copybooks was emblazened a map of the continent, with all the twelve countries of the  then EEC coloured in bold. The European flag, with its blue and yellow star per constituent nation, was similarly omnipresent. At that age, kids tend to develop very specific fascinations (pokemon, anyone?), and with mine being atlases, flags and international football, something in the layout of the EU rather appealed to me.

It’s not as facetious as it sounds. People start supporting football teams from a young age for such spurious reasons as the colours they wear, a player on the team with a funny name or their Dad likes them, and religious organisations get you involved when you’re too young and unintelligible to do anything about it. What those two things have in common though is that both often end up fostering an unfettered, lifelong loyalty, however abstruse the introduction was.

It goes without saying that my interest and involvement in the EU is based nowadays on a more logical and intellectual sphere, but the fact I was intrigued cosmetically by the EEC as a child certainly did no harm. Not everyone was as interested as me mind, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that they seemed to keep changing things all the time.

We’d all just got used to the idea of the EEC in school when it became the EU, we were just about remembering  the cast of 12 western European countries when Austria, Finland and Sweden joined, so now we had fifteen countries to remember. By the time the ten others were introduced in 2004, most students of my, by then, teen age had long since forgotten their primary school dalliance with Europe, and had much more urgent if ephemeral things on their mind. And so, for a whole generation the EU is much less a pan-European political organisation as a relic of an education long since confined to the dusty filing cabinet of the memory, along with the theorem of Pythagoras, the conditional mood and the function of the proximal convoluted tubule. And not much more relevant either.

Ask your average Irish citizen what they think of Europe and it’s just as likely you’ll get their opinions on merits of The Final Countdown as a power rock classic than the inner workings of the Berlaymont. More often than not, the elections of MEPs are used as a  de facto referendum on the government of the day, leaving European issues well on the periphery. And with the voters I’ve talked to, the main issue on the table this year  is “taking vengeance” on the current government, pushing Europe further down the list of priorities.

Even when we vote directly on Europe, like with Lisbon last year, we struggle to debate it on the merits alone. In many ways our initial rejection of the Nice Treaty was very much for  juvenile grounds, a mix of geographic embarrassment  for failing to keep up with the political effects precipitated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR and the fear that if the EU absorbed ten small new countries into the fold then Ireland, long the baby of the community, would become a kind of continental Jan Brady, which would explain our recent dismal performances at the Eurovision Song Contest. Nobody finds our kitsch singing and dancing cute anymore, and it kills us inside.

Even though we did eventually pass Nice, that “What about me?” attitude has simmered on and it was the beating of the Lisbon Treaty. Systemic hubris from the pro-treaty side allowed the anti-treaty side, a motley group composed of the religious right, the far left, republicans and Bond villain pastiches, to frame the question and thus exploit both the inscrutable nature of the treaty and our own mixed thoughts and expectations from the EU. 

On one hand curbing the power and waste of those lousy bureaucrats in Brussels was a powerful electoral issue, yet the idea that the Commission would be streamlined from 27 to 18 members was even more anathema to us, because it’d mean we’d lose our Commissioner for five years out of every fifteen. The calls for a more accountable EU were loud and clear during the election, yet giving greater responsibility to the European Parliament, elected regionally and directly, and the Council of Ministers, chosen from elected national governments, was roundly eschewed. Small wonder we often need two votes to clarify these things.

What the EU means to Ireland is a difficult question to consider, mainly because  we haven’t the foggiest notion what it means. It’s up in our heads somewhere that it’s broadly beneficial to us, but we’re just not sure why. Or how. And while we’ve been poor at meeting Europe halfway of late, Europe’s advances haven’t exactly been universally engaging either, and that’s why the phenomenon of early classroom fascination is so important. The importance of EU involvement  not only has to be fostered from an early age but not allowed to drop off either. If people think of European Union not in terms of shadowy political officials with an air of menace but an institution that makes it beyond easy to go foreign for our holidays, funds almost every community and youth initiative going in the country, provides Irish industry with a willing market and the ability to compete, in other words an institution that effects us in a matter of ways every day, then indifference wouldn’t be so much of a viable option.

Having been part of a relatively small economic community for nearly thirty years, and being the poorest member thereof, to being part of a much larger EU as one of the wealthiest is something of a culture shock. The world is a very different place to what it was twenty years ago, and Ireland has been witness to a lot of that metamorphosis. A lot of issues are still in flux, both domestically and internationally, and we’re struggling to fully make sense of them. The new 27 member state EU is still very much finding its’ feet, but the countries on the darker side of what used to be the Iron Curtain will soon know the benefits of being involved all too well. And hopefully we in Ireland will remember them too.

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