Father George Rutler on the Irish Blasphemy

The Constitution of Ireland begins: “In the name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, / We, the people of Éire, / Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, . . .”

The landslide vote in Eire for legalizing the fictitious form of marriage between persons of the same sex, in contradiction of all laws natural and divine, unearths the pulsating Druidism that Saint Patrick and his fellow saints defied. The estimated $17 million from pressure groups in the United States is no excuse, for people will only be pressured if they are willing to be pressured. The other dismal fact is that over 90% of the young people influenced to subscribe to this vote were formed in Catholic schools. The vote was less in favor of perversion and more in hostility to a Church whose Jansenism and clericalism had incubated corruption and lassitude. While most of Europe suffers from the deadly sin of indifference, or sloth, Ireland is in adolescent rebellion, virulent and irrational. This was exploited by political interests hostile to Christian civilization, and their propaganda combined legitimate accusations against ecclesial failings with a left-wing, secularist agenda.

Ireland helped to bring the Faith to America, and when the flourishing of that Faith degenerated here, that donation was returned in the form of a bacillus. Ireland today has one of the highest rates of suicide and mental illness in all Europe, and one-third of children there are born out of wedlock. Things are worse in the United States. Look at the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City to see what happens when the honor of a saint is dishonored, and when ambassadors for Christ become nothing more than goodwill ambassadors.

What happened in Ireland was not sudden. Like a dead elephant that remains standing for a sort while before collapsing, so the Flame that Patrick kindled on Tara had died long before Catholicism was mixed up with political causes, and ethnic drollery replaced dogma. In mordant irony, just a few weeks ago  the Stormont in Northern Ireland rejected a motion favoring same–sex unions, a motion more indicting for having been introduced by the Sinn Fein, which had long persuaded naïve Americans that it was a Catholic cause.

The Archbishop of Dublin, hardly a firebrand, said: “Marriage is not simply about a wedding ceremony or about two people being in love with each other. Marriage, in the Constitution, is linked with the family and with a concept of family and to the mutuality of man and woman as the foundation for the family.”

In light of the fine invocation of the Irish Constitution, the Irish vote is worse than perverse: it is blasphemous. All the great saints of once-verdant Ireland would have used stronger language.

Irish President to Reciprocate Queen's Reconcilliation Gesture

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were welcomed to Ireland in 2011 by then President Mary McAleese.

From AFP

President Michael D. Higgins is to become the first Irish head of state to make a state visit to Britain, in another symbolic step forward for relations between the neighbouring countries. 

The visit in April will come three years after Britain's Queen Elizabeth made a groundbreaking trip to the republic, which experts said put Anglo-Irish relations on a new footing. 

Higgins's visit will be seen as a further sign of progress following the hard-won peace in Northern Ireland, which remains part of the United Kingdom. 

Higgins's Aras an Uachtarain official residence confirmed he has accepted an invitation for a three-day state visit. 

The details are yet to be fleshed out but the 72-year-old poet is expected to stay at Windsor Castle, west of London, from April 8 to 10. 

Though Higgins has visited Britain several times since taking office in November 2011, they were not official state visits, where Britain lays on the pomp and ceremony.

President Reagan's Remarks at a Luncheon Honoring the Prime Minister of Ireland on March 17, 1982

Irish Miracle

From The Wall Street Journal
By Norman Stone

The Irish find themselves for the first time ever being showered with compliments from the English. This writer -- a Scot -- does not really approve of Ireland's independence. They are us, bless them, and their independence has been a bore, a little bit like East Timor's. Friends, family, writers -- all belong to an Ireland that's greater than the sum of its parts.

Now that greatness has been manifested. The Irish have done a miracle and wrecked the latest project of the European Union, in a referendum where general cussedness has been expressed. The proposed changes to the way Europe works amount to a constitution, but the powers-that-be tried to smuggle it through as a treaty. The British were supposed to have a referendum as well but since everyone knows that Europe is just not a popular cause, the government weaseled out of one. The French and Dutch did hold referendums three years back and the formal constitution was turned down.

The Europeans -- at any rate the official classes -- would dearly love to project themselves as a Great Power, American-fashion, and in 2004 produced a constitution. It was prepared in an extraordinarily clumsy way, with vast gatherings presided over by the former French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, in a style that Margaret Thatcher found profoundly irritating ("Olympian without being patrician"). The best constitutions either do not exist, as with England, or they are short, as with 1787 in Philadelphia. The Germans had a shot at a constitution in 1848 and invited all their professor doctor doctors to have a say. There are few occasions to bless the arrival of the Prussian army and that was one: The beards were bayoneted.

You might even make a rule about this: The longer the constitution, the shorter its life. The Weimar Republic is a classic case, and it taught the West Germans in 1949 what not to do in such documents; the German basic law is almost a model. The other rule is of course not to let professors of political science anywhere near such documents.

The European constitution is a lengthy and unreadable one because so many different interests had to be squared. Thus for instance, toward the end of the near-five-hundred page effort, the "Sami" or, as they used to be called, Lapps get a look-in.

Now there was a certain obvious sense in getting the European institutions to work better. They go back 50 years or so, and even the present flag is vaguely copied from the banner of the Coal and Steel Community in 1951; the assembly and the court were thought up then, and maybe someone even conceived of an anthem. The founder, Jean Monnet, found it insufferably boring, and you could even make a case that the creative element in Europe was America. The first suggestion of a common European currency came from the deputy secretary general of the Marshall Plan.

The European institutions worked tolerably for a time with six member states, but even then they were not brilliant. They were secretive and lofty, in that French technocratic style that so irritates others, and the best monument to them is the Common Agricultural Policy, born in 1962 and since then notorious for corruption and unreformability. The institutions were again not very efficient when there were only nine members, in the seventies, and Mr. Giscard d'Estaing made another of his blunders when he tried to make the European cause more popular by arranging for the Community to have a popularly elected parliament. Any journalist with a taste for mockery had a wonderful time in the European Parliament, self-important and powerless.

Now, with 27 member states, there is an obvious need to change the rules, and even for allowing national vetoes to be lifted. One absurd example: Greek Cyprus was let in as a member and now has the power to disrupt Europe's negotiations with Turkey, a country 40 times larger, and in a hugely strategic position. It is also the case, under present rules, that the presidency of the Union shifts every six months round capitals -- Paris one minute, Riga or even Valetta in Malta the next. Those small states do not have the wherewithal for the job, and in some cases have appeared ridiculous. Thus, over the Yugoslav crisis some 16 years back, which was billed to be "the hour of Europe," a Mr. Poos appeared from Luxembourg and lectured the Slovenes as to how they had no right to be nationalistic -- Luxembourg, beside which Slovenia looks positively elephantine. Meanwhile, the Germans have become the most important power in the east and south, and they are also the paymasters.

It is all a strange echo of the world of 1918, after Czarist Russia had collapsed, and various new states emerged -- the Ukraine especially, but also the Baltic republics including Finland. Back then the Germans were intent on setting up a satellite empire. In Hitler's time a quarter-century later this was even more the case, with Slovakia and Croatia (and even, though in a muddled way, Kosovo) emerging as Nazi puppet states. Nowadays, the lines on the map can be strangely similar to those of Hitler's day. But of course we are dealing with an altogether different Germany -- a Germany which, for a long time, simply did not want to have a foreign policy. One foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, once rejected a campaign for Germany to have a seat on the U.N. Security Council with the remark that it would be like giving a liqueur chocolate to an alcoholic.

This new peaceful Germany is one that the Anglo-Saxons always wanted to see -- arguably America's greatest creation, bar Japan -- and she has to deal with big problems -- the Balkans, Russia and the future of Turkey's relationship with Europe. Why make these matters dependent upon the whims of little local politicians in Greek Cyprus or wherever?

Now the Irish, with a referendum, express the general discontent and boredom that the European Union seems to inspire almost everywhere. Some commentators have responded more or less with Bertolt Brecht's line about the East German workers' uprising in 1953: If the people act against the will of the government, then perhaps the government should dissolve the people and elect another in their place. The German foreign minister even said that the Irish could just drop out of the Union for a bit -- an absurd remark.

There have been other lofty tickings-off: How could the Irish be so ungrateful, given what Europe had done for them? But of course the Irish might not see things that way. For instance, free movement of goods and people is not always positive. There has been a crime wave associated with the shift of East European immigrants. Then again, not everyone benefits from the huge rise in property prices which, rightly or wrongly, people associate with the euro; quite the contrary, life becomes very difficult for the young if they do not have parents who can support them. One nasty phenomenon in Spain or Ireland is that the young have to live with their parents and one sign of this is the used contraceptive in the public parks. So it is not altogether surprising that great masses of Irish voters voted against a "Europe" with which they cannot identify.

The sad thing is that Europe deserves better. It is associated with the recovery of a decent Germany, escaping from her awful past and now co-existing on civilized terms with Czechs and Poles and French. Yes, there should have been some briefly worded document to reform the creaking institutions of Europe. But true to form the Europeans mismanaged the entire affair. Having had the original constitution turned down, they should simply have lived with the consequences. Instead, they have behaved in a weaseling and dishonest way that would never have occurred to the great 1950s architects of Europe, men with culture, honesty and a sense of where their extraordinary civilization had gone wrong. Thank God for the Irish.

Mr. Stone is a professor of international relations at Bilking University in Ankara and author of "World War I: A Short History," forthcoming in paperback from Basic Books.

IRELAND SAVES EUROPE

Today is a great day for freedom! Freedom loving people in Europe and around the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Irish people for voting "NO" on the Lisbon Treaty, which is effectively the constitution for a totalitarian superstate that unelected European elites seek to impose on that continent. It would have destroyed national sovereignty, made national parliaments irrelevant, and has even redrawn European maps with new regions and without national borders. It would accomplish, through bureaucratic fiat, what Napoleon and Hitler could not.


From The Telegraph
By James Kirkup, Tom Peterkin in Dublin and Bruno Waterfield in Brussels

Gordon Brown is under intense pressure to declare the Lisbon Treaty dead after Irish voters delivered an overwhelming vote against the European Union's drive toward greater integration.

In the only popular vote on the treaty to be held in the EU, 53.4 per cent of the Irish electorate rejected its terms – plunging the EU's plans to create a new European president and foreign minister into turmoil.

MPs and campaigners from across the political spectrum called on the Prime Minister to halt moves towards British ratification of the text in the wake of the vote, with David Cameron saying the treaty should now be "declared dead".

The agreement, which would sweep away dozens of national vetoes, must be ratified by all 27 European Union members before it can take force next year.

Opponents said the emphatic Irish result meant the project – described as an attempt to revive the defunct EU constitution – should be completely abandoned.

Mr Brown however, is preparing to defy British public opinion by pushing ahead with the treaty's ratification in parliament. Government legislation ratifying the text is due to get its third and final reading in the House of Lords on Wednesday.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said: "It is right that we follow the view that each country must follow the ratification process to its conclusion. It is right that we continue with our own process."

Mr Cameron described the Government's plans as the "height of arrogance" and accused the Government of "flying in the face of public opinion."

He said that Mr Brown should go to the commons on Monday to explain what would happen now.

"If this is not dead, we must be able to have the referendum in this country so that we have the chance to pass judgment on this treaty and put the final nail in its coffin," he said.

Ministers privately concede that abandoning the ratification, Britain would seal the fate of the treaty.

Mr Brown is said to believe that doing so would reduce Britain's influence and split the EU, with countries like France and Germany press ahead with their own integration plans.

However, his determination to push ahead with the treaty puts him at odds with British voters, with opinion polls showing that most reject the document.

A Daily Telegraph campaign seeking a UK referendum on the text last year gathered well over 100,000 signatories.

William Hague, the Conservative shadow foreign secretary, insisted that the British parliamentary ratification process must be stopped immediately.

"The Irish people have spoken and they have made clear that they do not want a Treaty that takes so many powers from the countries of Europe and gives it to distant institutions in Brussels," he said.

"Despite all the threats that have been made they have had the courage to make their own decision. They deserve Europe's admiration and congratulations.

The call was echoed by Labour MPs. Frank Field, a leading Labour opponent of the treaty, said the British process should stop at once.

He said: "The result speaks volumes. The people in the one country given a chance to vote have clearly rejected the Treaty. The Government must now withdraw its Bill ratifying the Treaty which should now be dead'.

Ian Davidson, another Labour opponent of the document said: "It is enormously significant that the only people who have had the chance to vote on the treaty have rejected it by a substantial margin. Now is the time for a period of reflection."

However, European leaders were making plans to find a legal way around the Irish 'No' vote.

Nicholas Sarkozy, the French President, was working with EU leaders and diplomats to plan a special "legal arrangement" to bypass the referendum rejection.

In a joint statement with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the French leader insisted the treaty was "necessary" for the EU and would go ahead.

Mr Sarkozy assumes the rotating presidency of the EU next month, and at a summit in Brussels next week he and Mr Brown will insist that the ratification process continues unchanged.

British sources said that the summit is likely to conclude that the Irish vote is a problem for the Irish government, not the rest of the EU.

"The Irish government will have to go away and think about how to proceed, but the rest of us will keep going," said a Foreign Office source.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, insisted that treaty would not be stopped.

"The treaty is alive," Mr Barroso said in Brussels. "The remaining ratifications should continue to take their course."

Every major political party in Ireland had backed a Yes vote, with opposition being led by Libertas, a small, privately-funded campaign group.

Declan Ganley, head of Libertas, said the vote should kill the Lisbon Treaty.

"The No result is the final answer on this particular Treaty That's democracy. That's how it works," he said.

Even the pro-European Liberal Democrats said the Irish result should halt Britain's move to approve the treaty.

Edward Davey, the party's foreign affairs spokesman said: "Once scrutiny of the treaty is completed in Westminster next week its ratification should be suspended."

Bill Cash, the veteran Tory eurosceptic, said: "Gordon Brown must now abandon the British moves to ratify the Treaty and renegotiate the treaties of the European Union. The Conservative party must seize the opportunity to decimate the government's European police and restore democracy to the UK."

Officials in London, Dublin and Brussels were at a loss to explain how Ireland's approval for the Lisbon Treaty can be secured following the result.

In 2001, the Irish rejected the EU's Nice Treaty, but were ultimately pressured into endorsing it in a second referendum after some sections of that text were re-written to address concerns about Ireland's military neutrality.

Privately, some diplomats fear that it will be impossible to address the Irish grievances against Lisbon, which are much wider than the objections raised to the Nice Treaty.

One senior British official said: "With the Nice vote, you could identify specific problems the Irish had with the text, answer them and then move on. But this is less focused, more a general rejection of the whole project, and accommodating it within the process could be very, very difficult."

Brian Cowan, the Irish Prime Minister, appeared to rule out a second Irish referendum to ratify the treaty, insisting that the issue of another vote "didn't arise".

He said: "The result does bring about considerable uncertainty and a difficult situation. There is no quick fix."

Apostle to the Irish: The Real Saint Patrick

The following is a reading from "The Confession of Saint Patrick, Bishop." Discover the real Saint Patrick as he describes in his own words his missionary role in fifth century Ireland.