Lisbon vote October 2nd - How do you intend to vote?

Spiritoftheseventies

Scofflaw wrote: »

Very well. That address has no more moral force than one by a banker pleading for less regulation. It's a revolting work of hypocrisy.

correctly,
scofflaw

anything in this treaty you actually disagree with?

simplistic

If somebody comes to your door with a contract with hundreds of pages that is incredibly difficult to understand but they promise that it will improve your life, would you sign it?

Any increase in state size, control or power is terribly bad.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGIgOIFdnMQ&feature=channel_page

Judith122

simplistic wrote: »

If somebody comes to your door with a contract with hundreds of pages that is incredibly difficult to understand but they promise that it will improve your life, would you sign it?

Any increase in state size, control or power is terribly bad.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGIgOIFdnMQ&feature=channel_page

I think people look to the dail to interpret the laws etc. and it is so hard to trust them because of all the payouts and bribes.

P. Breathnach

Judith122 wrote: »

I think people look to the dail to interpret the laws etc.

That is what the courts are for.

and it is so hard to trust them because of all the payouts and bribes.

What payouts and bribes?

Spiritoftheseventies

P. Breathnach wrote: »

That is what the courts are for.



What payouts and bribes?

a bit off topic but think poster is talking about the Tribunal referring to planning and rezoning.

Judith122

bayviewclose wrote: »

a bit off topic but think poster is talking about the Tribunal referring to planning and rezoning.

Look, the politicians are saying how we should vote saying it is good for us. But if there has to be tribunals the question in my mind is do they care mainly about themselves and careers??

I was not going to vote even, but now its in my diary -2ndOct- and it will be no!

This is called "Lisbon 2nd October how do you intend to vote" so ive said what i'm doing and why and sorry if its *off topic* for you, it isnt for me, or my family and most of my friends and we will all just have to head out and vote :P

Spiritoftheseventies

Did not mean to be rude was just saying it was a bit off topic (payouts and bribes) given the nature of this thread. And dont just vote to give the two fingers to the establishment. Study the issues here. A lot of them which for the most part are explained well in these pages.

ei.sdraob

bayviewclose wrote: »

Did not mean to be rude was just saying it was a bit off topic (payouts and bribes) given the nature of this thread. And dont just vote to give the two fingers to the establishment. Study the issues here. A lot of them which for the most part are explained well in these pages.

unfortunatelly a lot of people would vote to give 2 fingers to the establishment, which doesn't have anything to do with Lisbon, and may end up hurting these voters and everyone else in the long term

worldrepublic

ei.sdraob wrote: »

unfortunatelly a lot of people would vote to give 2 fingers to the establishment, which doesn't have anything to do with Lisbon, and may end up hurting these voters and everyone else in the long term

That is a simplification. That is not a basis for voting, and of course people can vote for a number of reasons. Some people will try to grasp the treaty itself, but it is mostly made up of ammendments, referring to other documents that the voter cannot hope to understand. In short, this treaty leaves so much open that politicians and those who influence then (banking lobbies?) will not be curtailed or regulated but will interprete the vast set of documents according to what suits (whose agenda?).

"the nature of the reform treaty itself is also to blame: it is complex and immune to simple explanation. The Lisbon treaty is essentially a series of amendments to the rules governing the technocratic structures of the European Union. It is understandable that this requires a script of some complexity, but this in turn puts the legislation at a further remove from the voter."

(See: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-lisbon-treaty-and-the-irish-voter-democratic-deficits)

I am not going to vote for a series of ammendments. Also, a few weeks ago I saw Brian Cower on the news and he was asked by the interviewer had he even read it. He said he had (of course he has to say that) but I think it is deceptive for him to give the impression that a small country like ireland would have any concrete guarantees in relation to how this complex web of legislation might be interpreted in the future.

ei.sdraob

worldrepublic wrote: »

That is a simplification. That is not a basis for voting, and of course people can vote for a number of reasons. Some people will try to grasp the treaty itself, but it is mostly made up of ammendments, referring to other documents that the voter cannot hope to understand. In short, this treaty leaves so much open that politicians and those who influence then (banking lobbies?) will not be curtailed or regulated but will interprete the vast set of documents according to what suits (whose agenda?).

"the nature of the reform treaty itself is also to blame: it is complex and immune to simple explanation. The Lisbon treaty is essentially a series of amendments to the rules governing the technocratic structures of the European Union. It is understandable that this requires a script of some complexity, but this in turn puts the legislation at a further remove from the voter."

(See: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-lisbon-treaty-and-the-irish-voter-democratic-deficits)

I am not going to vote for a series of ammendments. Also, a few weeks ago I saw Brian Cower on the news and he was asked by the interviewer had he even read it. He said he had (of course he has to say that) but I think it is deceptive for him to give the impression that a small country like ireland would have any concrete guarantees in relation to how this complex web of legislation might be interpreted in the future.

so you are gonna vote against it because you dont understand it?

worldrepublic

"The Eurocrats will get their treaty by executive fiat and judicial activism"

(See:http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45821,opinion,the-lisbon-treaty-will-be-pushed-through-by-stealth)

Is this the kind of Europe we want? One that operates through manipulation and stealth? It is time to stand up and finally be counted (again)? I believe many others in Europe will rally to endure our votes are not ignored, or glossed over.

ei.sdraob

worldrepublic wrote: »

"The Eurocrats will get their treaty by executive fiat and judicial activism"

(See:http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45821,opinion,the-lisbon-treaty-will-be-pushed-through-by-stealth)

Is this the kind of Europe we want? One that operates through manipulation and stealth? It is time to stand up and finally be counted (again)? I believe many others in Europe will rally to endure our votes are not ignored, or glossed over.

do i have to endure my posts (asking you a question about your post) being ignored, or glossed over oh the undemocratic injustice of it !!

is this the Boards.ie politics posts we want? where new members operate through manipulation and stealth?

:P

Spiritoftheseventies

end of the day we have to get as much information out there. Treaty needs to be examined properly.

K-9

bayviewclose wrote: »

Quoted the full article. suggest you browse over this. http://debates.oireachtas.ie/DDebate.aspx?F=AGJ20090326.xml&Ex=All&Page=2 and you can take whatever you want. from it. But from what i can see their right to a living is being curtailed by restrictions.

In general the restrictions are there to ensure they have a right to a living.

Judith122 wrote: »

Look, the politicians are saying how we should vote saying it is good for us. But if there has to be tribunals the question in my mind is do they care mainly about themselves and careers??

I was not going to vote even, but now its in my diary -2ndOct- and it will be no!

This is called "Lisbon 2nd October how do you intend to vote" so ive said what i'm doing and why and sorry if its *off topic* for you, it isnt for me, or my family and most of my friends and we will all just have to head out and vote :P

There are some bad politicians so therefor all politics is bad?

worldrepublic wrote: »

That is a simplification. That is not a basis for voting, and of course people can vote for a number of reasons. Some people will try to grasp the treaty itself, but it is mostly made up of ammendments, referring to other documents that the voter cannot hope to understand. In short, this treaty leaves so much open that politicians and those who influence then (banking lobbies?) will not be curtailed or regulated but will interprete the vast set of documents according to what suits (whose agenda?).

"the nature of the reform treaty itself is also to blame: it is complex and immune to simple explanation. The Lisbon treaty is essentially a series of amendments to the rules governing the technocratic structures of the European Union. It is understandable that this requires a script of some complexity, but this in turn puts the legislation at a further remove from the voter."

(See: http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-lisbon-treaty-and-the-irish-voter-democratic-deficits)

I am not going to vote for a series of ammendments. Also, a few weeks ago I saw Brian Cower on the news and he was asked by the interviewer had he even read it. He said he had (of course he has to say that) but I think it is deceptive for him to give the impression that a small country like ireland would have any concrete guarantees in relation to how this complex web of legislation might be interpreted in the future.

It is no different to other EU Treaties in that respect, nor Finance Acts for that matter. What's your alternative?

In fairness to Cowen he was 100% honest about it in the 1st referendum, so on this issue, I do believe him. On that logic, when he said he didn't read it the last time, you must have thought he did! He can't win, can he!

Scofflaw

bayviewclose wrote: »

anything in this treaty you actually disagree with?

Interesting question. The short answer is no, not really. I've read several different summaries, I've read the treaties themselves, I've read endless analyses and criticisms, and I really can't think of anything in there that I genuinely disagree with.

There are lots of things I disagree with at the policy level in the EU. I'm ambivalent about CAP, and think the method for negotiating quotas in the CFP is disastrous. I think the Commission and Council have a very poor understanding of technology, which they mix up with a very technocratic attitude to citizen security, but I think that's true of the upper echelons of the political, business, and media world across the entire planet.

The institutions, and the institutional arrangements, on the other hand, I don't have any real disagreement with. They could do with more transparency (who couldn't?), and they could certainly do with simplification, but the Treaty really does deliver quite a bit of that. It's not a perfectly democratic system, but it's sufficiently democratic for the powers it exercises. I'm far more concerned about the growing detachment of national governments and their tendency towards oligarchy, their endless love-ins with special interests, and their tendency to talk to their own specially created echo chambers - and I think it's reasonable for that to be my major area of concern, because it's the national governments that have the right to tax us, to police us, to conscript us, to hamper our free speech, to make the media their servant rather than ours, to distort our planning processes and the mechanisms of local and national government, to waste our tax money on ill-conceived vanity projects, to destroy our natural heritage and to ignore our cultural one, to drag our public life into the gutter, to bloat our civil service and pad quango boards with party apparatchiks, and even to do the same to our democratic institutions - after the last election, FF's party secretary was made a Senator for the remaining month. I'm also concerned about the growing detachment of urban Ireland from political mechanisms that originally served a rural country - Ireland is a corporatist state, and there are far too many of us now with no representation in any body corporate. The parties have suffered root and branch decay, with phantom cumanns propping up ever more centralised parties - and the same seems to be true of many of the 'corporations'. The misplaced sense of entitlement is another issue.

So, in a treaty that is fundamentally a reform of the institutions, and which amends treaties that largely deal with the institutions, there's not really likely to be much to object to. I don't suffer, for example, from the delusion that giving up vetoes will somehow reduce us to the European equivalent of the Aran Islands, because that gets squeaked every single time, and still hasn't happened. Nor do I care that Ireland's "voting weight" has gone from sod-all to sod-all (measured a different way), because if the EU ever starts to operate by the kind of adversarial voting that many No voters appear to believe it already does, then it will be time to leave. The main thing the EU suffers from at the moment is a sort of nervelessness, but that's mostly because the reform effort that started even while Nice was being ratified has been stalled for years, and the attention of the EU is currently concentrated on its own inner workings rather than on the world - and there's a lot happening out there, from the gathering effects of climate change to the resurgence of Russia. On its own, Ireland will have little impact on any of these things - as part of the EU, and a part that seeks to play an active and progressive role, it will.

I hadn't had quite as much time to study the treaty last time round as I have had now. I've had a whole extra year, and I've discussed it nearly every single day in that time. I wasn't sure, last time round, whether some of the No side claims were true or false, but now I am. I haven't found a single bogeyman in the closet.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Spiritoftheseventies

Well on the whole fisheries angle I dont think an IFO chairman is going to furnish an oireachtas committee with false truths when that may be the only chance he has to address them. If you read piece, most of them were tooing and froing so he had to be precise with his argument.
As for Treaty the worse thing YES side can do is bring in celebrities to advance their case. One was on Radio the other day saying that as issues of Abortion, Taxation and Neutrality had now be sorted there were no more stumbling blocks. A soundbite at best.

P. Breathnach

bayviewclose wrote: »

Well on the whole fisheries angle I dont think an IFO chairman is going to furnish an oireachtas committee with false truths when that may be the only chance he has to address them. If you read piece, most of them were tooing and froing so he had to be precise with his argument.

I imagine that he didn't knowingly give wrong information to the committee. But once a false claim enters the public domain it can gather verisimilitude (a phenomenon understood, and exploited, by Libertas among others). Scofflaw took the trouble to discover the facts on this, and you now choose to ignore them.

As for Treaty the worse thing YES side can do is bring in celebrities to advance their case. One was on Radio the other day saying that as issues of Abortion, Taxation and Neutrality had now be sorted there were no more stumbling blocks. A soundbite at best.

That is so vague as to be worthless. Who was the celebrity? What was the programme? What exactly was said? Are people's concerns about abortion, taxation, and neutrality now sorted?

Hitman Actual

P. Breathnach wrote: »

I imagine that he didn't knowingly give wrong information to the committee. But once a false claim enters the public domain it can gather verisimilitude (a phenomenon understood, and exploited, by Libertas among others).

Yeah, I agree with this, and I think a lot of people in Irish politics aren't too bothered about using verifiable statements. I remember in the run-up to the Euro elections, one of the FF East candidates came out with the "80% of our laws come from the EU" line as a reason to vote for him.

Scofflaw

bayviewclose wrote: »

Well on the whole fisheries angle I dont think an IFO chairman is going to furnish an oireachtas committee with false truths when that may be the only chance he has to address them. If you read piece, most of them were tooing and froing so he had to be precise with his argument.

In fact, that's exactly what he's done - used false figures. He probably doesn't know they're false, and neither does the Oireachtas Committee, but they are. I can tell you exactly the provenance of the figures he used.

A lot of people are apparently under the impression that the government, and organisations like the IFO, have at their fingertips true and accurate figures for everything that might be relevant to their interests. They don't - like everybody else in this country, they pick up whatever figures are convenient. Media, politicians, civil servants, general public - everybody just uses whatever figures come to hand, with the sole justification that someone else had already used them. Where true and accurate information is available, it's often from a non-Irish source. Sad but true.

gloomily,
Scofflaw

Spiritoftheseventies

P. Breathnach wrote: »

I imagine that he didn't knowingly give wrong information to the committee. But once a false claim enters the public domain it can gather verisimilitude (a phenomenon understood, and exploited, by Libertas among others). Scofflaw took the trouble to discover the facts on this, and you now choose to ignore them.



That is so vague as to be worthless. Who was the celebrity? What was the programme? What exactly was said? Are people's concerns about abortion, taxation, and neutrality now sorted?

Denis Hickie on Ray Darcy show. He is with Pro Lisbon campaign. Said he was a floating voter and brought up that most people had voted no because of their worries about Abortion, Taxation and Neutrality.

P. Breathnach

bayviewclose wrote: »

Denis Hickie on Ray Darcy show. He is with Pro Lisbon campaign. Said he was a floating voter and brought up that most people had voted no because of their worries about Abortion, Taxation and Neutrality.

While Hickie is a celebrity, he is also a reasonably bright guy. Are his views to be discounted just because he was a very good rugby player?

Spiritoftheseventies

P. Breathnach wrote: »

While Hickie is a celebrity, he is also a reasonably bright guy. Are his views to be discounted just because he was a very good rugby player?

sure he is "reasonably" bright. but why bring him in. He is well known thats why. As is Robbie Keane. Its a cheap sell. IFO may have their own agenda but they do have first experience how EU law affects them.

Scofflaw

bayviewclose wrote: »

sure he is "reasonably" bright. but why bring him in. He is well known thats why. As is Robbie Keane. Its a cheap sell. IFO may have their own agenda but they do have first experience how EU law affects them.

The 'agenda' bit is the problem. There are laws that affect business owners, for example, which some businesses almost certainly find objectionable because they prevent them doing things like paying less than the minimum wage, or having their workers do longer hours for no overtime, or not employing women or Muslims or Catholics - does that make them objective critics of those laws?

cordially,
Scofflaw

Spiritoftheseventies

Scofflaw wrote: »

A lot of people are apparently under the impression that the government, and organisations like the IFO, have at their fingertips true and accurate figures for everything that might be relevant to their interests. They don't - like everybody else in this country, they pick up whatever figures are convenient. Media, politicians, civil servants, general public - everybody just uses whatever figures come to hand, with the sole justification that someone else had already used them. Where true and accurate information is available, it's often from a non-Irish source. Sad but true.

gloomily,
Scofflaw

So if pro Treatyites quote figures how are we to trust them. are they are all non-irish sourced?

Spiritoftheseventies

Scofflaw wrote: »

The 'agenda' bit is the problem. There are laws that affect business owners, for example, which some businesses almost certainly find objectionable because they prevent them doing things like paying less than the minimum wage, or having their workers do longer hours for no overtime, or not employing women or Muslims or Catholics - does that make them objective critics of those laws?

cordially,
Scofflaw

Which businesses are we talking about. Irish or Eu?

Scofflaw

bayviewclose wrote: »

So if pro Treatyites quote figures how are we to trust them. are they are all non-irish sourced?

Neither pro nor anti-Treaty people are particularly likely to be accurate. Everybody used the "80% of laws" figure until recently, because nobody had bothered to check it. Same with the fish figures. Everybody cites the €200m figure as if it were some kind of verified and verifiable fact, but the figure behind it don't exist. Try asking a single question of anyone who uses the figure - what was the value of the catch in 1986* (or any other single year)?

You should try and verify the figures yourself, whoever quotes them. In discussion, obviously, you can ask what the source of the figures is - and don't take bland statements like "EU figures" or "government records" as an acceptable source. Ask which ones - ask for some item of detail.

I appreciate that sounds a bit time-consuming, but on the other hand, there's a relatively small number of figures that get used again and again in this debate, so it's by no means impossible.

cordially,
Scofflaw

*Irish catch 1986: $85.47m

Scofflaw

bayviewclose wrote: »

Which businesses are we talking about. Irish or Eu?

Both, surely. Is it important?

cordially,
Scofflaw

Spiritoftheseventies

Scofflaw wrote: »

Both, surely. Is it important?

cordially,
Scofflaw

Well in terms of the IFO can we assume that their members work suitable hours. And if not is it because of their employers or because they are having to work longer hours because of restrictive EU laws. If Irish fishermen are not prospering in their own waters what waters can they fish in to make a decent living

Scofflaw

bayviewclose wrote: »

Well in terms of the IFO can we assume that their members work suitable hours. And if not is it because of their employers or because they are having to work longer hours because of restrictive EU laws. If Irish fishermen are not prospering in their own waters what waters can they fish in to make a decent living

That depends - will they be overfishing as the poor old cockle fishermen did?

This is the traditional problem with fisheries - no fisherman wants his catch restricted, but unrestricted fishing destroys the fisheries. Irish fishermen take 45% of the catch in Irish waters - if Irish fishermen were allowed to catch absolutely every bit of fish in Irish waters at levels the scientists agreed would allow stocks not to collapse, they'd get about as much as they currently get, no more.

cordially,
Scofflaw

K-9

bayviewclose wrote: »

Well in terms of the IFO can we assume that their members work suitable hours. And if not is it because of their employers or because they are having to work longer hours because of restrictive EU laws. If Irish fishermen are not prospering in their own waters what waters can they fish in to make a decent living

If not, maybe it's because they want to work them?

Do you have much experience of the fishing industry and its practices?