There are never-ending stories of dodgy money, suspicious transactions, hidden accounts, cover organisations pretending to be independent but really just Sinn Féin.
By law, All parties are required to submit detailed comprehensive accounts to SIPO (The Standards in Public Office Commission). All the parties but a handful obeyed it. Micro-parties said they couldn't afford accountants to do their accounts. Among the larger ones, the only one to refuse to comply point blank was Sinn Féin. SIPO had to threaten to report them to the DPP for prosecution before they agreed to obey the law. The accounts they supplied were so convoluted and dodgy that a specialist forensic accountant who worked with the NYPD on tracing Mafia accounts had to be hired to deal with the Sinn Féin accounts.
In Britain a media investigation into corruption in Westminster among politicians. To the surprise of the London media, Sinn Féin came out as even more corrupt than the Tories. The scams they committed were off-the-scale. In every parliament they win seats in, they are surrounded by sleaze on a gigantic scale.
They are also brazen in their hypocrisy. They once made a big deal about the Oireachtas buying in highly expensive top-of-the-range printers, performing faux outrage. They never mentioned that the party that had demanded the Oireachtas buy those printers was . . . Sinn Féin. Its TDs wanted them.
The media of course never mentioned that fact. I asked a journalist once why they didn't mention that it was Sinn Féin that had demanded those printers be bought. He said "everyone knows it!" No they didn't. That was the problem. Just because he and I both knew it, and people around Leinster House knew it, did not mean voters did.
Then again, Sinn Féin is the embodiment of hypocrisy. I remember before the Lisbon Treaty the Minister for European Affairs invited all the spokespeople on Foreign Affairs, and their advisers, into his office on the Ministerial Corridor in Government Buildings to brief them in detail on the treaty. We all turned up and sat around the round table, but there were two empty seats - for the Sinn Féin spokesperson and his adviser.
Afterwards, Sinn Féin accused the government of excluding them from the briefing. It was garbage. Their names were visible on group email sent. Their office was rung repeatedly, including once by the minister in front of me. Someone from Labour went to the Sinn Féin floor to remind them the meeting was about to start. I rang my opposite number in Sinn Féin, whose number I had, to remind them. After half an hour, we gave up waiting and held the meeting.
We knew what they were up to - pretend they were not invited, to play on their usual tactic of claiming victimisation. They also ran a campaign that was 100% built on lies - including the usual rubbish they say in every single EU referendum (this is about joining NATO, if you vote for this you will be voting away your right to ever vote on treaties again, this will introduce abortion, bla bla bla). They are the single set of reusable lies.
If the Sinn Féin people had turned up and trotted out that nonsense, in a room full of people who knew the treaty in detail, they would have gotten short shift and couldn't claim "nobody told us we were wrong!". They could spoof journalists, few of whom had read the treaty, and use the ludicrous 'equal time' rule on television and radio to their advantage. The rule is nonsense as it takes far shorter to make an allegation than to disprove it. It is like claiming that someone is a spouse abuser in 8 seconds, and then expecting someone to disprove it in 8 seconds. It is why in US presidential debates, a person usually has two minutes to respond to an allegation. Disproving a claim about a treaty article means being able to quote the article, so by definition that takes longer.
One of the few journalists who knew his facts, of course, was then RTÉ Europe editor Sean Whelan. One left wing anti-EU politician tried to spoof that Article 48 of Lisbon meant voters were voting away their right to have referendums - which was laughable. However, usually they got away with the lie. However Whelan correctly pointed out all the changes were made to how the EU institutions approve treaties, Not to how the member states approve treaties.
The article said "The amendments shall enter into force after being ratified by all the Member States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements." In other words, no change. How countries ratify treaties is decided by them based on their constitutional rules, and nothing there is changed.
In Ireland's case, the rules are simple: If a treaty increases the EU competences, that requires a constitutional amendment to allow that, and that requires a referendum and always will. If a treaty does not increase the competences, then as those competences were authorised by a past constitutional amendment, there is no need for a new amendment, so no need for a referendum. The Oireachtas has the constitutional power to ratify the treaty in that case.
That has been the case for decades. It is dead simple. New competences = referendum. No new competences = no referendum. In other words, not one iota of the procedures in member states changed. The only change was creating two procedures rather than one for how EU institutions, not the member states, approve treaties.
⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.
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