On one level, signing up to the EU migration pact is entirely in keeping with the DNA of Irish politics, and Irish politicians. Before one even considers what is in the documents that will soon become the governing law of the country, one could confidently predict passage: The most important consideration is not the contents of the document, but the fact that it is a document that has been negotiated at European level, which immediately and overwhelmingly predisposes establishment opinion in Ireland in its favour.
If Ireland has one over-riding foreign policy objective, it is this: To be a good and reliable EU partner. It is inconceivable then that an Irish Government would go to Brussels after an agreement had been made, and voluntarily seek changes to that agreement once negotiations had closed. That is simply not in the DNA of the Irish state. The only occasions on which Ireland has ever done that have been those occasions when the Government was forced to by its own people by the defeat of a referendum on an EU treaty. On those occasions, while the embarrassment at losing the referendum might be acute, our politicians can at least tell their EU colleagues that they have no other choice but to seek changes.
When it comes to the Migration Pact there is, and can be, no referendum. It is a simple matter of whether our Government will sign up, or declare that they object. The social pressure that they feel from their EU peers to sign up is often something that is deeply underappreciated by the commentariat and by voters. When you are in a club, nobody wants to be the problem member. Ireland is particularly averse to it.
That said, none of the above is an argument for forgiving the Irish Government for what it is about to do: The migration pact amounts to arguably the single greatest transfer of sovereignty from Dublin to Brussels in the history of this state. Consider that, moving forward, the number of migrants that Ireland accepts on an annual basis will no longer be set in Dublin, but set in Brussels instead. Deciding what that number is will, simply, no longer be the business of the Dáil, the very people we elect to decide such things.
This Government simply does not have a mandate from the public to disempower the electorate in this fashion. They did not run on a manifesto commitment of signing up to such a pact. They did not seek the authority to effectively limit the choices that their voters can make in the next election. And those choices are limited: Effectively, voters will be limited to choosing between accepting the number of migrants that the EU assigns us, or choosing to leave the EU altogether. Irish politicians are well aware that option two is off the table for 90% or more of Irish voters, meaning that option one is all that remains: Voters will be forced to accept a policy in perpetuity whether they agree with it or not.
It should also be noted that Ireland is abandoning any right to veto future changes to the migration pact: At present, we have an effective veto on whether it shall be applied to Ireland because we can simply refuse to sign up. However, once we have signed up, the specific terms of the pact can be altered in future. Ireland’s Government will have a say in that, but not a veto: Alterations will be decided by qualified majority voting, which means they can be outvoted by other countries.
The import of that in practical terms – and this is not to suggest that such a thing would definitely, or even probably happen – is that Ireland’s requirements in terms of the number of migrants it must accept could be dramatically revised upwards without the consent of the Irish Government or the Irish electorate. That is what happens when you cede control of your own migration policy to other EU countries, in perpetuity.
In that sense, Senator Michael McDowell and others are entirely correct when they rage – and rage is the appropriate word to describe their feelings – that the railroading of this pact through the Oireachtas is a democratic outrage. Not only in terms of the process being followed to ram it through, but in terms of the import of what is being rammed through. No Irish voter – not a single one – was asked at the last election or in any subsequent vote whether they wished to transfer away sovereignty to Brussels over immigration. It will happen – that much appears certain – without the voters ever having given a verdict on it.
In the United Kingdom, it is often the case that the party whip is applied only in two areas: Votes that affect Government spending and votes on issues that were in the party manifesto before the previous election. In other words, if the Conservative Party ran on a promise to ban horse racing, then all Conservative MPs would be whipped to vote for the bill because it was an explicit promise made to the voters. However, if some Conservative Minister in the last year of a parliament chose on his own initiative to bring forward that law, without it ever having been in the manifesto, MPs would consider themselves free to vote against it.
In Ireland, no such distinction is made. One of the many problems with that is how undemocratic it is: The Irish people are having a radical alteration to the state and its powers made without ever having been consulted. In the immortal words of Liz Truss, That. Is. A. Disgrace.