Ireland to leave EU should Britain exit ?

gallag wrote: »

We shall agree to disagree!

Sure, I'l stick to the facts and you can disagree with even acknowledging any facts and stay in that happy place of yours in your head.

But I'll still continue to point out whenever you're telling porkies or fantasy island 'facts'.

hman231 wrote: »

Your statement makes no sense. The two ritches countries in europe where their youth have the best chance in life are not in the E.U. The E.U must be stopped. The Swiss and Norwegians are laughing at us and they will never ever go into the eu after seeing what it is doing to their neighboring countries.

I presume, from what you say, that you've no idea about either and probably have never set foot in either.

Both Switzerland and Norway are, many practical terms, in the EU in so far that both are required to, and do, implement EU legislation as it is issued from Brussels. Both have exactly the same freedom of movement that the rest of the EU has, for example.

The debate on whether Switzerland will join ended here a long time ago and the general feeling is more one of 'when', rather than 'if'. I see evidence of how we're not in the EU here every day; ordering anything over the Internet has a good chance of getting caught by customs in the post, I still get to use duty free whenever I go home to Ireland, but ultimately 90% if it's an EU rule on health, quality, labour or whatever, we probably have it already copied to Swiss law.

Norway, on the other hand is apparently laughing so much at EU members that it even advised the UK it was better off remaining one - which does not help your argument too much. So your claims turn out to be false. Sorry.

The rest of your posts are the usual, gleeful, prophecies of doom - wishful thinking with no argument, let alone evidence, to back them up, so I think we can safely file them in the 'crank' file.

as i have said before the irish public are quiet thick and just dont understand simple logic. The eu is creating laziness among-st the Irish youth. I want the best for my country thats why in anti eu

You've not demonstrated much logic yourself, so I suppose by your reasoning you must be Irish. Still, EU is creating laziness? That's a new one and I'm not sure how it works. Care to explain?

oscarBravo wrote: »

Euroskeptic logic: voting more often is less democratic.

In fairness, this is a valid criticism. If you need to democratically get people to vote multiple times in quick succession until they give you the 'right' answer, then there is a democratic defect.

Thing is, while the EU is certainly flawed, the 'little islander' approach is far worse - not hard to see, given the quality of argument used to promote it.

oscarBravo wrote: »

The EU didn't "need" the Irish public to vote at all; that's one of many constitutional idiosyncrasies unique to us.

Perhaps, but repeating a vote in quick succession until you get the 'right' result is not terribly democratic. If it's a democratic deficit, it's properly an Irish one - it's our system that allows governments to do this, rather than anything to do with the EU, but it's still a democratic deficit.

Couple it with an anti-EU cohort that's prepared to disseminate blatant lies, along with an electorate who would rather believe those lies than (heaven forfend) do any actual research on the topic, and you end up with a situation where the government is denied permission to ratify a treaty it negotiated in good faith for reasons that have precisely nothing whatsoever to do with the text or context of the treaty.

Under those circumstances, I don't see a major democratic defect in asking us to vote again. The alternative was to re-negotiate a treaty in order to remove aspects of it that were never in it. Given a choice between notionally undemocratic and blatantly, mind-bendingly stupid outcomes, I know which I'd pick.

I understand what you're saying. As, I think Churchill once said "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter", which is essentially what you're getting at. And to a great degree it is a dreadful system - with illiterate morons deciding on issues that they cannot even intellectually grasp, let alone make an informed judgment on, manipulated by lobby groups more than happy to empty blatant lies and FUD for this purpose (we get this here all the time).

However he once also said "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others", which is also true because as much as we may wish we could reply upon Platonic philosopher kings who will always be guided with the greater good in mind, they're not always so.

That's why the people retain the option to say 'no', and frankly should retain that option, even if they are, by and large, idiots.

oscarBravo wrote: »

I understand the philosophical arguments, I really do. Pragmatically, however, if you ask someone a question and they answer "no", and the consequences of that answer are potentially damaging and far-reaching, and you know they weren't listening to the question when you asked it...

...it's really not that big a deal to ask "are you sure?".

Sometimes it's a big deal to get them to comprehend the difference between small and far away, TBH. Not everyone can be on the right hand side of the Bell curve, I'm afraid.

For me, the single biggest downside to having multiple referendums is having to listen to the Euroskeptics bleat on and on and on and on about how the nasty EU made us do it, which is just so headwreckingly predictable, and utterly wrong, and predictable precisely because of its wrongness (because wrongness is, let's face it, the primary raw material of most Euroskepticism).

The vast majority of Euroscepticism, at least in the EU, is ultimately based on xenophobia. Argue long enough and nine out of ten eurosceptics will eventually admit that it comes down to the Germans, Italians or whomever "not being like us". Everything else, all the 'reasonable' areguments are invariably based on false axioms or the use of complex terms which sounds authoritative until you realize they don't have a clue what they're talking about.

It's why we get people talking about Switzerland, who wouldn't know the first thing about Switzerland, and claim we could be just like them - a quick comparison of just CIE and SBB would quickly disabuse you of that fantasy. Or that the EU was really meant to be a common market, which it wasn't and demonstrably wasn't, but they'll go into some weird form of denial and just blatantly ignore any facts that don't back up their position.

Honestly, such is the level of fanaticism of ardent eurosceptics, that I'm convinced that either they are perfectly aware that they are dishonest in their arguments, presumably for 'the greater good', or have mental health issues.

As for the people having the right to say "no": they retained that right in the repeat referendum, despite what the nay-sayers would have us believe.

Would you agree if it was a general election and they got to have it multiple times until SF got into power? That's the problem with what you say; it's fine as long as it's for the greater good that you recognize.