roc wrote:
jake76 wrote:
One wonders what goes throught these peoples minds.
They are traitors to Ireland, their actions resulted in the loss of our soverignty.
You seem to be overlooking the fact that when we "had" sovereignty it was the likes of PJ Mara, Seanie Fitz, Bertie, and all the rest of the boys who were doing the sovereigning. I say bring on the civilising influence of the EU at least in terms of macro-economic management. Personally, I'd very much welcome their high level input too into social, cultural, environmental and heritage issues. Perhaps when we manage to raise our social-cultural consciousness in general, develop our educational systems to promote better self awareness, big picture view, public mindedness etc, we might start thinking about taking some of those functions back. But for now, we are obviously not up to it.
I am no fan of Mara or the rest of our politicians. But I have my doubts that some external force in Brussels or elsewhere is going to magically give us a Xmas present of good governance.
Have you ever researched French, Italian, Belgian, Spanish or Greek governance ? The French prime minister (Beregovoy) was found dead by a canal with his bodyguard's guns missing in 1993 - never properly explained. Chirac only avoided jail by virtue of constitutional immunity. Berlusconi I hardly need to go into it, but he follows a long line of crooked Italian prime ministers (Andreotti and the Mafia, Craxi etc.), the Belgians are patronage-mad and their police system protects paedophiles and threatens judges who uncover them (cf Dutroux).
As for Brussels, the entire EC Commission had to resign in 1999 due to patronage and corruption centred on Eurostat AND the EU has never had a clean audit opinion !
The idea that we're somehow going to get better governance or cleaner politics from Brussels or indirectly from other Europeans is laughable. A lot of Pinsters expressed that view in the thread on the recent referendum and it is frankly wrong.
The reality is that if you want to be better governed or have decent politicians, it starts at home. The Finns, Swedes and Dutch gave themselves good governance FIRST and THEN joined the EU.
