Republican News · Thursday 17 October 2002

Gerry Adams addresses packed pblic meeting

Nice sweeps away economic sovereignty

Voting No to Nice Treaty and trying to implement the Good Friday Agreement are the same struggle - to achieve equality and the Republic on this Island.

The hall was packed. A long queue of people stretched out of the doors of the Gresham into the street. They were waiting for Gerry Adams, who came from his meeting with Blair in London earlier that day to speak to people in Dublin at a meeting on the Nice Referendum last Thursday evening.

Ciaran Doherty, a young man from Ógra Shinn Féin set the scene with a speech in defence of neutrality.

Roger Cole from the Peace and Neutrality Alliance took up the theme. "This force, a nuclear force, which has taken on the 'right' to operate 2,500 miles from EU borders in so-called 'peace enforcing', is not the Red Cross." He quoted Jose Maria Gil-Robles Gil-Delgado, a former president of the European parliament, who said 'We need to be a military power to be a world power.'

"The RRF", Cole said," is the force to build the EU into what Prodi said 'could and should aspire to be a world power' - a federal Super State, a new European Empire. Do we want that?"

Gerry Adams then gave a most upbeat speech, on the EU, on republicanism and on where the project to bring peace to this island lies now.

"I find the fact that we are having this referendum quite bizarre - to vote again on exactly the same treaty for a second time," he said. The government did not even have respect enough for the votes of the people in the first referendum to negotiate a protocol, as did the Danes, to upheld our neutrality.

"Nice is about changing the rules of governance of the EU, it's about a totally different dispensation. It's about sweeping away economic sovereignty. It's about decisions being taken away from state legislatures and determined centrally," said Adams.

"The core value of Irish Republicanism is people - any state must be people centred - this is our vision of a national republic in an Ireland of Equals. It's about housing, education, health, staying on the land.

"'You are never going to get that', they say, 'It's utopian. Go for the least worst option'. This is the politics of 'the least worst option'. My experience has taught me, all down the years, that you've no chance of getting the best option, unless you try.

"When we said that it was possible to get peace on this island, it was only by having the best option in mind. We are continuing to argue it out. A lot of other states are watching us. The way the EU has dealt with your votes, as if they didn't count - this is the EU of Nice 2, where the peoples, or states, are not equals, and some count less than others."

Crisis in the Peace Process

Gerry Adams then turned to talk of the current events on everyone's mind, as the unionists speeded up the crisis by withdrawing from the Assembly. "The GFA, like the Nice Treaty, is about the Reconquest of Ireland - and I believe we will see an Irish Republic on this island.

"The crisis emanates from the crisis in unionism. Unionists believed they were the top dogs across the whole country, and then, after partition, in the Six Counties. Garvaghy Road was about 'Croppies lie down'. Those Days are over. There is no escape from the Good Friday Agreement. The Brits didn't break a treaty, they minimised it.

"The Good Friday Agreement is over four years old now, and we are all suffering crisis fatigue, but I am sure the people in the Middle East would love to have their problems reduced to ours. Blair's job is to uphold the Union. Unionists will not go up the path to equality on their own, they have to be coaxed, persuaded. You think that's hard. Try Bairbre or Martin's job."

Gerry Adams talked of the struggle for human rights, He talked of Holy Cross School, of the continuous nightly attacks on nationalist people. "We are dealing with people who peddle drugs by day and are sectarian killers by night. There were three blast bombs last night, thrown into peoples' houses.

He went on: "The Good Friday Agreement is for these people. You have to find your space within this. Struggle is not handed down from above. You have to find a way to be a part of this. My conviction is that we will sort out the Peace Process - that we will have the opportunity of living republicanism on this island."