The year was 1972 and the question before the Irish people was: should Ireland enact a Constitutional Amendment permitting it to join the European Economic Community?
This was the first occasion on which I had the opportunity to vote and, in accord with the majority of those who participated in the referendum of that year, I voted in favour of the Constitutional Amendment. I believed then, and I still believe now, that the creation of a free trade European area was a good idea. The clue was in the name: the European Economic Community.
However, I have never approved of nor, for historical and political reasons, have I ever believed in the wisdom of the project of an ever-closer political European Union, so I voted No to all subsequent EEC/EC/EU related referenda:
—Single European Act (1987): 44% turnout; 70% yes; 30% no
—Maastricht Treaty (1992): 57% turnout, 69% yes; 31 % no
—Amsterdam Treaty (1998): 56% turnout; 62% yes; 38% no
—Nice I (2001): 35% turnout; 46% yes; 54% no
—Nice II (2002): 49% turnout; 63% yes; 37% no
—Lisbon I (2008): 53% turnout; 47% yes; 53% no
—Lisbon II (2009): 63% turnout; 67% yes; 33% no.
A glance at the history of these referenda reveals a strange asymmetry. Unlike Scripture, which advocates that your yea be yea and your nay be nay, whenever the Irish people approved of a proposal, that was the end of the matter, but when they rejected a proposal, they were asked to vote again until they gave the right answer.
When the proposal to adopt an EU Constitution was rejected by the French and the Dutch (c. 2005), that scuppered the project and a projected Irish referendum on the matter was simply cancelled. Different strokes for different folks. However, the Lisbon Treaty effectively replaced the proposed Constitution.
Of the seven major EU institutions, by far the most significant are the European Commission, the EU’s executive quasi-cabinet, acting under the autocratic control of an increasingly imperial Presidency, the European Parliament, which putatively oversees the work of the Commission but is even less successful in that enterprise than national parliaments are over their executives; the European Central Bank, whose role it is to manage the dubious monetary experiment of the Euro, overseeing such policy for the Eurozone and, not the least important, the Court of Justice of the EU which includes the European Court of Justice that functions as a kind of EU Supreme Court.
(The European Court of Human Rights, to whose misguided judgement in Goodwin vs UK we ultimately owe the Gender Recognition Act, is not an official EU institution, though nonetheless effective for all that.)
To say that there is tension between the EU and some of its constituent countries is an understatement. This tension manifests itself in a number of areas: legal, economic and political.
Legally, the EU is attempting to impose its liberal social agenda on some countries, whether they want it or not and, in general, to subordinate national law to EU norms.
Economically, it has always been an open question whether the monetary union could survive without a fiscal union, a union that, according to Mario Draghi, a former head of the ECB, would require more pooled sovereignty for the EU and, since sovereignty is a zero-sum game, more sovereignty for the EU and its institution means less for the EU’s constituent countries. Additionally, the self-inflicted damage that is being caused to the EU economy and the living standards of Europeans by the delusional Green-dominated energy policy should, but probably won’t, lead to the abandonment of this policy.
Politically, representative democracy, the current political system of the constituent countries of the EU, being neither truly democratic nor coherently representative, suffers from a democratic deficit, but that democratic deficit pales in comparison to the gaping democratic deficit manifested in the political entity that is the EU. Whatever small possibility voters have of affecting the actions of their national governments—and it’s not much—they have little or no possibility of bringing any democratic pressure to bear on the increasingly detached-from-the-people-entity that is the government of the EU.
The root problem of EU non-democracy is that there is no European demos. Europe is a complicated patchwork of different peoples, histories, languages, customs and social norms. Geographically, Europe is simply the western end of the Asian continent from which it is somewhat arbitrarily distinguished. What makes Europe to be Europe is not an allegiance to a fictitious geopolitical entity, past or present, but rather a common religious foundation in Western Christendom.
The two most immediate political problems for the EU are immigration and war.
The effective open-door EU policy on immigration, which has been stoutly resisted most notably by Hungary, is giving rise to social and cultural decay, religious tensions—not to mention serious criminal justice problems—and is not in any way a solution to the impending demographic implosion facing Europe.
The Ukraine/Russia war has done what war always does, which is to strengthen government power and authority at the expense of individual rights and freedoms.
Moreover, in a new and dangerous escalation of the EU’s policy of aid and comfort to one side in this conflict (as pointed out in an email [15 December 2025] sent by Anthony Coughlan Spokesman, for The National Platform EU Research and Information Centre, to all TDs and Senators and others), the EU Commission plans to play fast and loose with EU law and the EU Treaties at an upcoming (18 December 2025) EU Council meeting by confiscating €200 billions of frozen Russian assets and giving them to Ukraine with, need I say, the support of the Irish Government.
Can the EU survive? Probably yes, at least in the short to medium term. Should it survive? No, certainly not in the dangerous expansionist direction in which it is travelling, with ever more power flowing to its unaccountable bureaucratic centre.
Is the EU a reincarnation of the Holy Roman Empire? Perhaps, but only in the sense of being an empire-in-the-making, but one that is conspicuously neither holy nor Roman—not that the Holy Roman Empire was conspicuously holy or Roman either, but it also wasn’t very much of an empire, being rather a loose, porous, ill-defined confederation of kingdoms, duchies, and free cities, and, perhaps paradoxically, all the better for being loose, porous and ill-defined.
The countries of Europe, with their distinctive histories and cultures, existed long before the EU and they and their peoples will exist long after it has gone, and Ireland, having once become a remote province of an imperial power, will have the opportunity to become a nation once again.