The magician's choice.

The Lisbon treaty and how the EU oligarchs always get what they want in the end.

The Lisbon Treaty was apparently created to streamline and reform the European Union (EU) to improve decision-making, enhance efficiency, and increase democratic legitimacy in the face of an expanding EU membership and evolving global challenges. Signed in 2007 and entering into force in 2009, it aimed, so we were told, to simplify the EU's institutional structure by creating a more permanent president of the European Council, enhancing the role of the European Parliament, and introducing new mechanisms for cooperation and governance. The treaty also sought to make the EU more responsive to citizens' needs by strengthening its legal framework and ensuring better coordination in foreign policy, making the EU better equipped to address global issues like economic crises, climate change, and security threats.

Ireland needed to hold a public referendum to ratify the Lisbon Treaty due to its constitution, which required approval from the people for any changes to the EU's powers.

In Crotty v. An Taoiseach (1987) the Irish Supreme Court ruled that Ireland could not ratify a previous treaty, Maastricht, without a public referendum because it involved significant transfers of sovereignty to the European Union. The Court found that any change in the balance of power between the state and the EU, especially in areas like foreign policy and the justice system, required a constitutional amendment, which could only be approved through a referendum. This ruling established the legal precedent that any future EU treaties that altered Ireland’s constitutional framework would similarly require a public vote. This applied to the Lisbon Treaty, which led to Ireland's two referenda on the issue.

The requirement to defer to the people was reiterated in A. v. The Attorney General (2008): where the Irish Supreme Court ruled that a referendum was necessary for Ireland to ratify the Lisbon Treaty because it involved the transfer of powers to the European Union, which would affect Ireland's constitutional sovereignty. This case reinforced the earlier rulings in Crotty and McKenna (which established the principle that the Irish government must adopt fairness and transparency with regards to any proposed alteration to the constitution). The ‘A’ case ultimately led to Ireland holding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. After the treaty was initially rejected, a second referendum in 2009 was held, which resulted in approval.

The Irish people rejected the proposal to accept the Lisbon treaty, requiring a renegotiation with alterations that was then presented, again, to the Irish public. In the subsequent referendum, once reassurances on key issues like neutrality and abortion, a second referendum in 2009 resulted in approval, allowing Ireland to ratify the treaty.

The Real Instituto Elcano, a pro EU think tank published an article in June 2008 attempting to explain why the Irish public voted against the Lisbon treaty, stating,

“No’ campaigners effectively scared the public. Even though there was no basis for their slogans, they stated in well-orchestrated and displayed posters throughout the country that: abortion would be legalised by Lisbon; Ireland would not be able to maintain its military neutrality; there would be conscription into an EU military force; corporate taxes would increase; and Lisbon would result in the privatisation of education and health. Smacking of some pretentiousness, the ‘No’ side also tried to explain to the Irish that its electorate’s rejection of Lisbon would kill the Treaty and force the renegotiation of key points for Ireland”.

The author, Rai Chari highlight’s how the Irish people were “mislead” by the “no” campaign’s rhetoric on various issues goes onto summarise the “false concerns” that effectuated the rejection, concluding,

“Nevertheless, one may argue that at least four main issues emerged. Many young voters, a majority of whom voted against Lisbon, were concerned that Ireland would lose its foreign policy neutrality under Lisbon. Many rural voters, conservative by nature, were also concerned that Lisbon would change the restrictive abortion laws (and, as some in the 'No' campaign suggested, even legalise same-sex marriages). And many citizens in general, at a time when economic growth was slowing down and unemployment on the rise, were afraid that Lisbon would alter the nature of the Irish corporate tax structure (with fears that investment would decrease).

As stated, several revisions and assurances were made by the EU authorities, to address the concerns of Irish voters and convince them to vote in favour of the treaty the second time.

What should be of concern to all Irish people is that each of those revisions have now, or close to be, expunged, in piecemeal, eroding the democratic will of the Irish people as well as highlighting the EU’s insidious means to achieving what it wants; supreme power. What should be worrying, and something neglected by journalists who get paid to scrutinise the establishment, almost all the issues to which Ireland rejected the unrevised Lisbon Treaty have now, or close to be, brought in through the back door, making an absolute mockery of 1) the rejection of the original terms of the treaty put to the people and 2) The approval of a revised treaty containing such clarifications and assurances.

The first overturning came with same sex marriage. After a highly emotionally charged, and highly distorted campaign Ireland overwhelming voted in favour of legalizing same-sex marriage on May 22, 2015, via the Twenty-first Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland.

The second reversal by stealth occurred on the 25th of May 2018 when the Irish people voted in favour of legalising abortion in the State, via the Thirty-sixth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland. Again, this campaign was largely won on the basis of emotional manipulation over clear reason, leading to 70, 000 unborn babies lives taken since the procedures were made legal.

The third concern has been slowly been reversed. Despite the assurances made in the revised Lisbon treaty that major incursions into sovereignty and the recognition of the most basic fundamental freedoms like freedom of expression would not be undermined, we have seen a plethora of mechanisms doing just that. For example, the passing of laws such as the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (2010) (which restricts certain forms of media content especially that which IT deems hateful and liable to cite others into hate) was incorporated into national law, specifically through the Broadcasting Act 2009 and other related legal frameworks and the Digital Services Act (2022) (aimed at increasing online platform ‘accountability’, or in other words, suppressing freedom of speech.

Then we come to the issue of sovereignty over the regime of Irish taxation which was also eventually toppled when the EU assailed the Irish Corporate Taxation policy described in Apple Inc. v. European Commission (2016). The decision held that Ireland's tax arrangement with Apple Inc. amounted to illegal state aid under EU law. The European Commission determined that Ireland had granted Apple preferential tax treatment, allowing the company to pay an effective tax rate as low as 0.005% on its European profits, far below the standard corporate tax rate in Ireland. This arrangement was found to distort competition within the EU, as it provided Apple with an unfair advantage over other companies. The General Court annulled the Commission's decision, but the European Commission appealed successfully and on the 10th of September 2024, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) upheld the European Commission's 2016 decision that Ireland's tax arrangements with Apple constituted unlawful state aid.

Finally, the issue de jour, concerns neutrality. The principle of neutrality, like the other issues aforementioned, was defended rigorously by the Irish public but we have seen the EU through its feckless puppets in Dail Eireann attempt to bring the EU into a third world war with the Russians. Recently, this week in fact, the EU commission under chief war monger herself, EU Ursula Von der Leyen has called upon the EU to ready itself immediately for the real possibility of large-scale war with Russia. The Warhawks in the Irish political establishment and globalist media cartel are busily attempting to persuade the same gullible public who fell for the previously mentioned referenda, to adopt a new policy of military intervention, and to reject neutrality. Apparently, the Irish establishment want to add Irish “white far right thugs” to the meat grinder in Ukraine while simultaneously spending a billion euro on self-interested migrants while children and the elderly lay on trolleys in Irish hospitals due to a lack of investment, and some women resort to sexual favours with their landlords to subsidise the costs of rising rents (SKY NEWS reported on this issue a week or so ago).

We have a Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, who only a few years ago made the following shameful exhortation in Dail Eireann “We want nothing to do with a backward-looking idea of sovereignty”, unless the sovereignty in question belongs to Ukraine or Palestine, then sovereignty and all its backward connotations are heralded vehemently deserving of immediate protection. Even more obnoxious was the presence of Martin at Béal na Bláth, a small village 33 kilometres from Cork City, for a commemoration of General Michael Collins, a man [Collins] who had participated in achieving, so the theory goes, the very backward looking sovereignty Martin denounced days earlier.

For many of us, the mirage of the EU as some benevolent institution is long gone. For many of us now, the EU represents a tyrant, an oligarchy of the wealthy and powerful, a cadre of psychopathic diplomats, bureaucrats and politicians who seek self-enrichment over the survival of our rich European identities and have no problem how they attain full spectrum dominance over the indigenous people of Europe. The same types today existed yesteryear, who played the board game RISK©, in real life on the battle fields of the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres; and when the blood lust wasn’t satiated demanded sacrifices on the beaches of Normandy, Arnhem and Sicily. Even then, they salivated for more, as young men were killed in Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq invasion and now Ukraine, Palestine and Syria. The warranted motivations of “the common good”, “the common interest”, “the public’s welfare” are all lies to mollify the easily manipulated emotionally entranced public.

In the end, it was always about what always existed from the beginning of time- power and it’s accumulation the hands of the few. It is that satanic drive that allowed a once splendorous angel called Lucifer to rebel and be cast into hell in his pursuit of full dominion. Democracy, so it now seems, is but an illusion, a crafty trick to convince the public that their say matters, but in reality anything that is presented as emergent from the bottom, the public, in truth originates from the top, a grand conjurors trick to persuade the plebs that they are participants in the game, which they will never be. It seems clearer and clearer than the public can be deceived in many ways, first present to them the magicians choice, and if they reject it, the public will be deceived into choosing it anyway.

"The first rule of politics is the preservation of power, the second is the acquisition of wealth, and the third is the manipulation of the people."

– Plato (from The Republic)