There have been previous letters to the Irish Times by European law experts on this topic, but unfortunately the new irishtimes.com site design seems to make it impossible to view previous editions.  The thrust of their argument, if memory serves, is that every treaty transfers or pools some sovereignty to the high contracting parties or to the institutions they thereby set up.

Of course the Irish people retain sovereignty in those areas not pooled or transfered and any new treaty, transfering/pooling additional powers, has to be ratified by referendum.

Each referendum is on a specific amendment to the Irish constitution and so it could be argued that the Irish constitution retains primacy insofar as it codifies what powers are transfered. However these amendments generally just refer to the transfer of powers "as provided for by the Lisbon Treaty".  So who is the final arbiter of what that Treaty entails?  My understanding is that it is the European court - but I stand to be corrected on this.

Where this gets tricky is if a dispute arose, between Ireland and the EU, on e.g. standardising the basis (as opposed to the rate) of corporate taxation.  Which court would have the final say - the Irish Supreme Court or the European Court - as to whether competence in this area had been transfered?

It gets even trickier if the EU were to decide that e.g. "abortion services" are covered by the services directive, and should therefore be freely available in all member states.

To my knowledge no such dispute has ever arisen and I am not personally competent to give an opinion on this - although it was raised as an issue during the Lisbon campaign by the NO side who argued that it could allow abortion into Ireland by the back door - particularly as the European Court is seen as an activist body keen to extend the remit of European law.

This is where a codicil or protocol stating explicitly that the provision of e.g. abortion services in Ireland is Governed by Irish law might be helpful in allaying fears of "EU law scope creep"

Of course, if you did include such a protocol us libruls would have to vote against...:-)

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