JOHN MEEHAN and ANNE CONWAY look at the political background and the results of the referendum.
A
FIANNA FAIL/Progressive
Democrat coalition government has ruled the 26-county part of Ireland since June
1989. It ran into serious trouble over a series of business scandals, closely connected with a privatization programme in the last part of 1991.
Government appointed directors of former state companies in the telecommunications and sugar production companies were caught lining their own pockets. The action taken was very mild: multi-millionaire Michael Smurfit, former chairperson of the Telecom Board, was forced to resign; a partner in one of his scams, Dermot Desmond - also a close associate of the then Taoiseach (prime minister)
Charles Haughey - had to leave one of his jobs as the chairperson of the state-run airports authority Aer Rianta. Finally, cosmetic action was taken at government level - long time Fianna Fail boss
Charles Haughey was deposed by a former ally, Albert Reynolds.
8
This bought time for the government,
International Viewpoint # 232 • July 6, 1992 and improved poll ratings.
But the problems have not gone away for ever. A special difficulty is caused by the owner of Anglo-Irish Beef Processors, Larry Goodman. Goodman built a huge agribusiness empire that collapsed with debts of £500 billion. His main creditors were major continental European banks, which had lent him money on the strength of assurances from the big Irish banks. It seems Goodman may have used some of the continental European money to reduce his exposure to the Irish banks. Goodman was so big that the government could not afford to allow a collapse - so special legislation was rushed through the Dail (parliament) to allow Anglo-Irish Beef processors to go into "examinership"
It is evident that Goodman made a lot of his money through defrauding the EEC under the Beef Intervention Scheme. He had a big "export trade" with Iraq before the outbreak of war there, but much of this business may have been fiction in order to milk the EEC for intervention money.
payments to the main bourgeois political parties.
Despite the mountain of evidence that privatization equals corruption, the government is intent on pushing the process further. Following a highly damaging strike in the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), the Minister for Energy, Bobby Molloy of the PDs, announced the company was to be split up, with the clear intention of weakening the trade unions in the industry.
The Post Office has gone through a six-week long strike over the introduction of casual labour. The big banks provoked a strike on very similar issues, using the fear of open competition facilitated by the Single European Act to worsen the conditions of the workers. The banks were able to stay open for emergency service during most of the strike, partly by recruiting from the vast pool of the unemployed.
### Decline in emigration
Official unemployment now stands at over 280,000, creeping up to 25% of the workforce and is already at the highest level since the foundation of the state in the 1920s. In fact it would be at least double this number but for the wave of emigration in the 1980s.
The big difficulty for the Irish ruling class now is that for the past two-and-ahalf years emigration has come to a halt, especially to Britain. It is common now to meet people in their late 20s or early 30s who have come back to Ireland because life became impossible abroad. Some call themselves the BTAs (Been to Americas).
This has important socio-economic effects, not least in the area of abortion. In February ten thousand people demonstrated in Dublin protesting against the internment of the 14-year old girl, victim of rape, whose parents eventually took her to England for an abortion. A big proportion of the demonstrators were young people in their twenties, people who five years earlier would have been abroad. In other words, real limits are being put in the way of the state's usual strategy of "exporting" social problems.
On the political level, this has produced a steady erosion of confidence in the main bourgeois parties. The showing of the "no" forces in the Maastricht referendum - which was considerably better than predicted before the Danish result - are an example.
"Are you for or against Maastricht?" "They'll try anything to discourage us" - [The next referendum on Maastricht will be in France]
The gathering together of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Progressive Democrat and Labour leaders was designed to shore up the credibility of a Maastricht Treaty that was losing popular support. This could well turn out to be a dry run for a multi-party government formula in the near future. Albert Reynolds claims he can achieve single party Fianna Fail government and end his "temporary little arrangement" with the PDs. The certainty of future political instability suggests otherwise.
Although the polls showed a steady increase in the "no" vote, the final 7-3 vote for Maastricht in the referendum became increasingly likely in the final days of the campaign as votes moved away from the "no" lobby because of the media emphasis given to the "Pro-Life" campaign. Other forces opposing Maastricht were largely ignored.
But the 30 percent vote against the Treaty was quite impressive given the weight of the "yes" lobby. This included the four main political parties, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), big business, the big farmers' organization and the Council for the Status of Women.
State backs yes vote
Taxpayers' money was used to fund the "yes" campaign. Government efforts to swing the vote in its favour - especially after the Danish referendum gave the idea that voting "no" was not such an outrageous thing to do - included setting up a freefone line to get information on the Maastricht Treaty (from the government's point of view of course), sending out one million pamphlets (in a country whose population is 3.6 million) arguing the case for a "yes" vote, and commandeering national television and radio for a pro-Maastricht broadcast by the prime minister two days before the poll, with no right of reply for the "no"
A government spokesperson was widely quoted in the media at the start of the campaign: "We will have to strike terror into the hearts of the Irish electorate". And the conduct of the campaign — one of bribes and threats - confirmed this strategy. Prime minister Albert Reynolds promised that women's right to travel abroad for abortions would only be guaranteed if the Treaty were ratified — a weighty threat.
Until the anti-abortion protocol in the Treaty came to light -with the case of the 14-year old girl denied the right to travel to England for an abortion - it had seemed that there would be no significant opposition to
But the uncovering of the protocol to the Treaty which confirmed Ireland's constitutional anti-abortion position, and then the ruling by the Supreme Court which interpreted the constitution to allow abortion in certain circumstances, provoked opposition to the Treaty from both pro- and anti-abortion forces.
Recent opinion polls have shown more than 80 per cent against the fundamentalist policies of anti-abortion groups such as SPUC (Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child). On this issue alone mass opposition could have been mobilized against the Treaty. But the "Repeal the Eighth Amendment Campaign" (campaigning for the repeal of the anti-abortion clause inserted into the constitution in 1983) prevaricated when it came to challenging the consensus of established women's groups in favour of the Euro-
Benefits for women
These groups see the influence of the European Community as beneficial to women in the Irish Republic because of the positions that the EC has taken in favour of equal pay, equal opportunity, childcare and so on, which have had a certain effect on women's position. For a certain - essentially middle-class — section of the population, the European Community is seen as representing "modernity" and "openness" as opposed to the closed and very Catholic "traditional" Ireland.
So SPUC was able to set the agenda for the anti-Maastricht campaign. The Repeal campaign had decided to call for a "no"
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IRELAND vote. But it stayed on the sidelines, despite the fact that the protocol would copperfasten the anti-abortion clause into European law. The real threat posed by this amendment - despite the government's promises and the Solemn Declaration" by the EC member governments that the protocol guaranteeing no challenge to the Irish constitutional ban on abortion through EC law was not contradictory to the right to information and to travel — was illustrated again recently when shipments of the British daily newspaper The Guardian were impounded because the paper contained advertisements for an abortion clinic in Britain.
Despite the trade unions' call for a "yes" vote, opposition to Maastricht was strongest in the working-class communities, which experience unemployment and deprivation. The Irish National Organization for the Unemployed was among those calling for a "no" vote, as was the Union of Students in Ireland (USI), environmentalist groups and Sinn Fein.
USI was instrumental in setting up "Youth Against Maastricht", the most promising feature of the "no" campaign. They campaigned on a progressive platform for workers' rights, women's rights and defence of Irish neutrality.
### Opportunist blunder
But the main anti-Maastricht campaign, the National Platform, refused to distance themselves from SPUC in the hope of some spurious tactical advantage. The opposite proved the case. In post-referendum interviews, many said they had voted in favour of the Treaty because they did not want their vote interpreted as being
When the realities of Maastricht begin to bite - cuts, job losses, and the restructuring of the Irish economy as a more subordinate part of Europe - antipathy is set to deepen further. The government will face a further difficult problem when it finally holds its long-promised referendum on the right to information on abortion and women's right to travel to Britain for abortions, promised for this autumn. Then we can expect to see the full weight of the anti-abortion lobby and the Catholic hierarchy mobilized, putting the government, which must still rely on its support PLANTE amongst the traditional inaholic voters of Ireland, g in a difficult position. * July 6, 1992• # 232 International Viewpoint
In any case, the need for an independent broad movement linking
Germany and Central Europe, dedicated to promoting friendship of the peoples by breaking the old pattern of German economic domination of mutually antagonistic Slav peoples, becomes clearer by the
International Viewpoint # 232 • July 6, 1992
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