Historically, Irish citizens resident in the UK have been allowed to vote in our elections. Many will therefore have a vote in the forthcoming EU referemdum. Besides being subject to Cameron’s fear tactics, they are also having to face a misinformation campaign orchestrated from Dublin.
Dr Anthony Coughlan has produced a list of five reasons why Irish voters resident in the UK have nothing to fear from the UK leaving the EU. They are as follows:
(1) Voting Leave does not mean any change in the long-established Anglo-Irish free travel area which goes back to the 1920s and is a matter exclusively for the two Governments and not an EU competence. Irish people will continue to move freely to and fro between the two islands as they have always done. They need continual reassurance on that score.
(2) Free trade will also continue between Ireland and the UK under all realistic Leave scenarios, so there will be no customs posts on the North-South border within Ireland, no passport controls and the like. All that is just scaremongering by the Remain side.
(3) If the Remain side should win and Prime Minister Cameron’s proposal is implemented that new immigrants to the UK should have lower social benefits than those already there, it will be impossible under EU law to differentiate between Polish, Latvian or French immigrants on the one hand and Irish ones on the other. So Irish immigrants will face cuts in social benefits too in the vote is to Remain In – which is one good reason why Irish people in Britain in general should vote Leave.
(4) As regards Northern Ireland, in so far as that area gets EU subsidies in the form of Regional grants, Structural funds, Farm payments and money for local “peace process” activities, such money is UK taxpayers’ money being recycled through Brussels, to keep the EU bureaucracy in business, for the UK is a major net contributor to the EU budget. Voting Leave would make possible increases, not reductions, in all such funding.
(5) Most Irish voters in Britain are working-class, oriented to Labour. Do Irish people want to be on the same side as that of the real economic/political “fat cats” of our time? It is clearly not in ordinary working people’s interests to line up alongside Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, the EU’s Big Banks, EU-based transnational capital, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Brussels bureaucracy, not to speak of Prime Minister Cameron. If the Remain-In side succeeds it means the job-destroying TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) is inevitable, negotiated by the EU on behalf of 28 States, with its dangerous Investor-State Dispute Settlement tribunals, instead of Britain negotiating its own trade treaties with the wide world independently.
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