(See http://ganleydeclan.blogspot.com/2009/09/justice-donal-barrington-on-declan.html
for Donal Barrington on Why to Vote Yes to Lisbon)
On Lisbon, the last word belongs to former Supreme Court judge Donal Barrington, whom age has not withered nor custom staled. Last Thursday, on TV3’s Nightly News, he sardonically agreed with Patricia McKenna that the Government's Lisbon guarantees meant little — but only to subvert her anti-Lisbon case. As he sardonically put it: “We now have a guarantee from the European community that your young people will not be conscripted into an army which doesn’t exist and which the EU has no power to raise.”
But Barrington's best was yet to come. When Vincent Browne asked him what the Romans of the EU had ever done for us, Barrington said he was old enough to remember the 1950s when barefooted children played in Dublin’s O’Connell Street; when businessmen left town in what was called the “Killiney flit”; when emigration was 100,000 a year; when our population had fallen to 2.8 million; when an American Jesuit had written a book saying the Irish people were destined, like the Jews, to be scattered all over the world; when, although nominally an independent state, we were still inside the British imperial system where our real role was to provide cheap labour, cheap food and soldiers for Britain. But then Barrington said we joined the European Union, and in 30 years we went from being one of Europe’s poorest countries to being one of its richest. And then he rested his case. The man is a national treasure.
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