If this treaty doesn't address the crisis, what will it do?

Now that we've established that the main economic aspects of this treaty would not have prevented the current economic crisis, and are unlikely to prevent one happening again, what does this treaty actually do?

This treaty has several other provisions, which can be looked at in isolation:

Article 3 states that if economic targets are not met, “a correction mechanism shall be triggered automatically.”

So if we don’t meet these targets and go by the economic policies of our current and past government, as well as the Troika – Then the automatic correction mechanism will be austerity rather than a stimulus packages. For example, since the global financial crisis the Australian Government has run a deficit in order to continue investing in the economy and it’s people. The result? No recession and at 4.9% it has one of the lowest unemployment rates of any western economy (It has also returned to surplus in 2012).

Under Article 8, if the aforementioned targets are not met the treaty allows the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to impose fines of up to 0.1% of a member state’s GDP. In Ireland’s case this would be approximately €155 million based on 2011 GDP figures.

Similarly Article 5 imposes another penalty - if a country is in breach of the economic targets, it may be forced into an “economic partnership programme”. This would be similar to the existing Troika programme, which has forced Irish governments to implement the regressive household tax, cuts to the minimum wage and the future imposition of a water charge.

As the YES campaign points out, all the economic aspects of the treaty are already in existence. This treaty will just cement them into law and add penalties. Article 3, 5 and 8 are central to this and allow undemocratic, unelected, external organisations to become involved in the fiscal decisions of Ireland. Throughout the crisis, EU leaders have continually decided to place the burden onto the shoulders of Irish taxpayers. Do you trust these very people to have more authority and powers over our state?

If this treaty had already been in existence during the past 10 years, the likely impacts Ireland would have experienced differently would have been:

·       The automatic implementation of austerity measures on ordinary working people and their families;

·       When the austerity didn’t work, as it clearly hasn’t, we would have received a €155 million fine;

·       Finally, we would have had a quicker loss of sovereignty to unelected, undemocratic bureaucrats because the ‘partnership procedure’ doesn’t require a bailout situation. The EU can come in and make changes to a society if a country is in consistent deficit.