EU

(This is an edited version of a paper read to a SIPTU seminar on the Services Directive on 13 January 2006.)

The people of France and the Netherlands have made their decision and the European elites will have to accept this. Although the process of ratification is not yet finished, it is hard to imagine the constitution has any realistic chance of being adopted. Politically it is dead, says Stefan Auer of the Dublin European Institute.

Scrap this right-wing treaty, says Sinn Féin's Eoin O'Broin

WHEN GENERAL DE GAULLE left power, the world did not end: but something more than a lamp-rather, a great, illuminating searchlight-was suddenly dimmed. His enemies and critics-with as much generosity as condescension and vice versa at that moment heaped praise on his head: he was, they said, a great man and so unique. The earlier attacks-that he had been a bloody-minded anachronism, forcing his will on a would-be enlightened world-were softened and muted.

AN EXTREMELY important meeting takes place in Brussels on November 17. The heads of government of the six Common Market countries are having a " sunlmit " to consider the future of Europe.

THE RECENT French devaluation differs to the sterling devaluation in 1967 in one important respect, It was a surprise!Whereas the English