THE LABOUR Party must be involved in the negotiation of the guarantees to be given to Irish voters before a second Lisbon Treaty referendum, party leader Eamon Gilmore has warned. Making it clear that he would not accept a "fait accompli" from the Government, he expressed concern that it was preparing to make concessions to social conservatives to encourage them to vote Yes.
European Union leaders agreed at the December summit that legal declarations would be offered on neutrality, taxation, abortion and education and the family before Irish voters would be asked to vote again.
The first three pose no problem, said Mr Gilmore, but the fourth could, since Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin have been unable to tell him what areas it could cover.
"We have asked, yes, and we have got no text. We have got evasion, yes. My concern is that what is being pursued here is a socially conservative agenda which goes way beyond the concerns that were expressed at the time of the referendum.
"Where did concerns about education and the family emerge from? The only reference to family issues was in the course of a television debate with Ganley where he made this wild assertion about three-year-olds being taken into care by the State," Mr Gilmore told The Irish Times.
A number of groups who appeared before the Oireachtas committee charged with investigating the reasons for the No vote expressed concerns that the European Court of Justice threatened to interfere in social and ethical issues, and had already done so in some cases.
However, Mr Gilmore said he would be "concerned" about anything that could reduce the rights offered to Irish citizens by the Charter of Fundamental Rights - which is attached to the treaty - to challenge EU law, or a member state's implementation of an EU law before the Court of Justice.
Negotiations on the texts of each guarantee will take place over the coming months, and the Government hopes to produce them in sequence to allow time for a public debate to take place in each.
"I have said to them that we want to be involved in the evolution of those texts.
"I don't want them to come back and present us with a fait accompli which could pose, depending on what is in them, difficulties for us as a party and which could pose difficulties for voters who value these things," he said.
"We put a very strong emphasis on the charter. We saw the adoption of the charter as something that was going to extend rights of the individual citizen in the EU, and give individual citizens access to the European Court of Justice and underpin a whole range of rights
"We have not seen any text yet . . . Until we do see that I don't think we can form a judgment," he went on.
Mr Gilmore said he had already put down a very clear marker in his private contacts with Mr Cowen and Mr Martin that he would not accept a dilution of the charter.
"If there is an attempt to water it down, or pull back from it, or derogate from it, that is something that we are going to have considerable difficulty with," he said.
