It betrays a fundamental lack of confidence in Ireland and the Irish people, as well as a remarkable blindness to the realities of our experience as I ve been describing them. In essence, the issue revolves around what you consider to be the purpose and limits of sovereignty. I see the true sovereignty of the Irish people as being not a theoretical concept but a measure of how successfully we can protect and promote our basic national interests and our social and economic wellbeing as a people. I believe that our consistent and bipartisan policy towards the EU over the past thirty years has done far more to achieve both purposes than any narrow policy of isolationism would have. In the real world, all countries, especially small ones, operate within very considerable constraints.
Nobody can pull the curtains and tell the world to go away.
Now more than ever, the need for the effects of globalisation to be managed and balanced is strongly apparent. All of the evidence surely is that we are. I note that even those who have most strongly opposed our membership do not now call for withdrawal. Neither do they explain how we would enhance our influence and our credibility within the EU by blocking for no good reason a fixed policy and major priority of the Union as a whole. The current version of the old prophecy of doom is that Nice will decisively shift the balance within the Union towards the bigger states, and will create a two-tier Europe with Ireland in the second group.