As a moderate libertarian compared to my friend Brian, I would have to say its rather ridiculous to fear the EU as some new soviet state. Ireland is far far left than the rest of Europe. The EU is rather likely to make Ireland privatise most of our state assets, than it would be make us nationalise other assets.

The power handed over the Brussels is over issues we cant solve on our own. Like energy security, sex trafficking and terrorism. Its not exactly oppression.

Irishlibertarian, if you read the Federalist Papers, you will see similar things said about the new U.S. Federal government. Nevertheless, the result was rather different.

I’m doubtful that even today it’s true that the only powers the EU has are appropriate for the regional level. Between a third and a half of the EU budget is allocated to the Common Agricultural Policy. This isn’t a solution to any problem: it just is a problem!

According to google:

(Ire Min Wage)
8.82 Euros = 13.158558 U.S. dollars

Man, I gotta start flipping burgers in Ireland.

To Arthur!

I visited the land of my father’s family, N. Ireland, in ’97, and both N.Ireland and the Irish Republic, home of my mother’s family, in ’98. On both occasions I went with a grandson in late February to mid March when both Aer Lingus rates and the price of food and lodging were so relatively cheap that travel to most places in the U.S. would have been more costly. When Ben and I returned to the Republic and especially Dublin during the same months of 2004, although air fares were still reasonable, the price of food had increased so dramatically that I spent the three weeks wishing we’d gone to New York City or Chicago, or some other cost-of-living Nirvana. (Aside: with the depression in Ireland, I think Aer Lingus winter fares may be back to ’97 levels.)

Two other significant changes in Ireland occurred in those seven intervening years: The island had shed some of its unique Irish quaintness with some of its cities acquiring the look and feel of urban and suburban America. And the violent Troubles in the religiously divided north had substantially subsided.

I’d long dreamed that the “six slave counties” of Northern Ireland would become independent and the first truly libertarian “state.” (In parentheses because a state without taxes wouldn’t be a state as states are known to be.) The North’s mostly-Protestant “Unionists,” so called, favor union with Great Britain as a buttress against being ruled by Catholic Irishmen, which would happen if the North became part of the Irish Republic. Loyalty to Britain extends no farther than staving off Catholic rule, for Unionists have been ready to take up arms against British forces whenever the North was threatened with being dumped by the Brits into the Republic.

Mostly-Catholic “Republicans,” on the other hand, favor becoming part of the Irish Republic to the south primarily as a means of escaping rule by historically tyrannical Britain or its surrogate unionist government. Republicans haven’t forgotten the fact that their Irish brethren to the south, with whom they joined in battle against British rule in the years leading up to the establishment of an Irish Free State, negotiated a treaty establishing a semi-Irish independence that left them behind and under surrogate-British (Unionist) rule, which proved to be even more oppressive of Irish Catholics than the Brits had been.

With the population of the northern slave counties divided roughly equally between adamant Unionists and adamant Republicans, each unequivocally opposed to being ruled by the other, what better place could there be for establishing a country where nobody rules anybody? Unfortunately, at least for the time being, the so-called “leaders” of Unionists and Republicans have chosen “power-sharing” as a solution to the Irish “Troubles,” rather than renouncing the power to rule over others as the only sure means to lasting peace.

I realize my comments may seem off the subject of the Republic’s relationship with the EU. However, an independent, non-EU Ulster (historically the six northern counties plus three now part of the Republic), without any taxes whatsoever, would be a fine counterpoint to the bloody rest of statist Europe. I dream on, and feel obliged to evoke the dream in any forum for the exchange of libertarian ideas..

A fascinating article. Thanks very much. Although my antecedents are more Scottish (Jacobite), I was trained in Austrian economics and Hayek’s legal philosophy in his final large work, Law, Legislation, and Liberty first presented in seminar at UCLA in the late 1960′s.
Now, I am a Green Party activist, and Ireland is one place where Greens have (predictably) had more than the usual electoral success. I followed this for awhile a couple of years ago, and like Iceland, your “going Green” coincided with the collapse of the centralized, authoritarian “Finance Capitalism” model which is now devastating the global economy.
I used to think the EU was a good idea. Hayek once told me that his view of the future would be a universal legal system of free trade and open borders, but not a “world government” trying to “regulate” the global economy. Actual power and administrative functions would devolve even below the level of current nation-states to the level of provinces, counties, or city-states.
I still think Hayek was right. We need to get rid of standing armies and the whole “imperialist” idea of centralized control of anything. The EU is modeled on the failed example of the United States – originally a federation of “sovereign states,” but since our Civil War, a centralized tyranny to foster industrialization and a vast military-education-prison complex which, in Orwellian fashion, will make alliances with “friends” that are constantly changing into enemies – everything being sacrificed to military might and “crusades” against different religions and cultures who are demonized as “terrorists” or whatever.
One would think, by now, that the EU would be discredited. But NATO and other fraudulent “anti-communist” organizations have a stronger hold than ever, and the militarists are expanding even into Afghanistan and Africa – as though that was something new and “progressive.”

Has not Ireland voted “NO” on EU integration many times before 2008? My family vacationed in Ireland in the early part of the decade and Ireland was conducting a campaign at that time whether or not to join. And this was not the first campaign. The complaint from the NO side was that the YES side would keep tinkering with the referendum and calling for another vote until it got a YES vote and then…no more votes! I think they were correct.