The fiscal question – wise or wild?

LIKE a lot of other people, I don’t know either how I am going to vote in the new European Fiscal Treaty Referendum next month. I cannot make up my mind. I don’t know whether it is going to be good for us or whether it might spell disaster.
I suspect a majority of the Irish people feel the same way. Some will support it because they always vote for Fine Gael. Some will oppose it because they vote for Sinn Féin or they are opposed to the household charges.
Now you might think a guy who has the cheek to write a regular political column in a serious and respectable newspaper like The Clare Champion would be able to come down firmly on one side or the other on a crucial political question like this one. But it ain’t necessarily so. One thing I cannot do is look into the future and predict what exactly will be the outcome of a somewhat complicated procedure.
The wise men who sit in council, the people Patrick Pearse referred to as “the men with the keen, long faces”, have been advising us all along that we have no alternative but to vote yes in this referendum. They tell us ratification of the Treaty is crucial for our whole economic future. “If we say ‘no’, we will be putting ourselves on our own outside of Europe and will have no place to go if we need to borrow again.”
That is what the wise men are saying. Then we have the people on the other side, the people who want us to reject this Treaty.  We’ll call them the wild men because that’s what the wise men call them. These wild ones say that if we vote yes, we will be surrendering the right to determine our future. We will be condemning ourselves to permanent austerity. Our budgets will have to be submitted to outsiders for approval.
So there you have both sides of this argument in a nutshell. I know there is a lot more that can be said on both sides but a lot of it is so complicated that even those of us, who comment on political matters on a regular basis cannot get to grips with it.
The Government is, of course, full of wise men, as is Fianna Fáil. But that party is still in a state of shock following the last General Election and does not know if it is coming or going.
The wild men are in Sinn Féin or in the socialist parties. They are opposed to most things that come from Europe. Less wild men, such as trade union leaders, are against the Treaty but might back it if it contained some measures aimed at stimulating growth and creating jobs in order to counter the long-term austerity at its core.
It is really not fair to label those who oppose the Treaty as wild men. Certainly, they are not all wild. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps it is they who are really the wise men. But it’s a handy, though perhaps a lazy way, to describe them. 
My own experience of politics tells me wild men in opposition parties always become very wise men whenever they get into government.
If our forefathers were wise men, there would have been no 1916 Rising and no War of Independence to follow that. They would have accepted the advice of the wise men of the time and died in their tens of thousands on the banks of the Somme or in the killing fields of Flanders rather than in small groups in the GPO or at Kilmichael.  We would have no Dáil Éireann and no Taoiseach. David Cameron would be our prime minister. We might not be here at all because the young men of Ireland in the 1940s would have been forced to fight and die for Britain in the Second World War.
So it was Pearse and Connolly, de Valera and Collins, who were actually the wise men in 1916, although they were branded as wild men then.
The men and women of 1916 did not sacrifice their lives in order to surrender our right to govern us to some powerful banking interests in Frankfurt.
That goes without saying. But as trade union leader David Begg said during the week, there is a gun “pointed at our heads” because of the threat of losing funding from the European Stability Mechanism. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We are damned if we do and we are damned if we don’t.
Me, I feel we are condemned to German banking dictatorship if we vote yes. And if we vote no, I feel the sky might fall on us. I don’t know for sure one way or the other.
Perhaps voting yes might not be as bad as Sinn Féin and the others are saying.  Perhaps we need outside help in steering our economy onto steady ground. Judging by the way we have handled our economy up to now, a little outside help might not go too far astray.
Certainly in a lot of other ways, we need Europe to protect us from ourselves. A lot of the present trouble about septic tanks, household charges and water rates arose because over the years, politicians were far more interested in their own popularity than they were in protecting one of our greatest natural resources – a clean water supply.
Greedy farmers were allowed to fertilise the land to such an extent they contaminated the rivers and lakes near them. One-off houses were allowed to be built with faulty septic tanks all over the place.
Only for the fact that Europe shouted ‘stop’, we would continue with this scandal into the unforeseeable future.
All this is one good reason for giving Europe more of a say in our affairs. Pearse and Connolly might not like it but they did not have to cope with over-fertilisation or faulty septic tanks in their day. I am sure they would want to see our rivers run free of pollution.
Let me put it this way, my head is with the yes side in this referendum but my heart is against the Treaty.
Perhaps we should follow the advice of the Irish Examiner and postpone the referendum. Francoise Hollande, the man most likely to be elected France’s next president does not like the Treaty as it stands. He wants to renegotiate it and have it expanded to include stimulation measures, just the same as the unions here are demanding. The Dutch are also kicking up. They are also likely to join the French in demanding a renegotiation.
So at present, it looks like we are buying a pig in a poke. Let’s wait and see what might be a changed package before we commit ourselves to supporting or opposing it.