Opposing the EU’s Assault on the Nation State…Biographical

                  –  Biographical notes on Anthony Coughlan 

Some years ago a postgraduate student working on a thesis on the politics of the Irish community in Britain, which I once took part in, asked me to give her a written outline of my political activity over the years.  This led me to do the first draft of these notes, written for her in the third person.  I have extended and brought them up to date since, as they may be useful to people interested in some of the issues they cover, in particular Ireland’s nine EU-related referendums between 1972 and 2012, as well as the Crotty, McKenna, Coughlan and Pringle constitutional actions before the Irish Supreme Court that related to these. Most Irish historians and commentators have failed to give accurate accounts of these events to date.  It is hoped that these notes may be of assistance to them when they do.           

           –   Anthony Coughlan, June 2025 

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Background

Connolly Association

Trinity College Dublin

Wolfe Tone Society

EU opponent

The Crotty case, 1986-7

The McKenna case, 1995

Overturning the 2001 Nice Treaty referendum: the Referendum Commission 

The Coughlan case, 2000

Constitutional revolution: the Lisbon Treaty 2008-9

The Pringle case, 2012

International work and political friendships: Bill Cash MP and Jens-Peter Bonde MEP 

George Gilmore and Gerry Adams

Campaign for an Independent Britain

The Ukraine war and defending the Triple Lock 

Personal life

Bibliography

Appendix 1: Note on the Supreme Court’s 1987 Crotty judgement 

Appendix 2: RTE’s Late Late Show “trial” of the EEC in 1972

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BACKGROUND

John Anthony Coughlan has been Ireland’s leading critic of the European Union since 1961 and is well-known in British and continental EU-critical circles for his writings and political work.

He was born in the Glenvera Nursing Home, Wellington Terrace, Cork City, on 29 May 1936. His grandparents were small farmers who had holdings in the hills above the small town of Bantry, West Cork.  His father was manager of Murphy and O’Connor’s Sawmills, Bantry, and his mother, also from Bantry, was a national schoolteacher. He received his primary education from 1939 to 1940 at the old Newcastle village school, ten miles outside Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, at the foot of the Knockmealdown Mountains, where his mother was then teaching; then at Bantry Convent of Mercy School during the World War 2 years from 1941 to 1945; and from the latter year onward at Sullivan’s Quay Christian Brothers School, Cork City.  His secondary schooling was at Christian Brothers College, Cork. He attended University College Cork (UCC) from 1953 to 1958, his primary degree (BA) being in English, History and Economics, for which he got first class honours in each subject in his degree examination in 1956.  Following this he did an MA in English by thesis, his topic being on the theme of tragedy in the novels of Thomas Hardy – a somewhat quixotic subject for a twenty-year old.  He emigrated to London in 1958 and spent three years in that city, during which time he worked as a supply teacher for the then London County Council, studied for a Diploma in Social Policy at Bedford College, University of London, and became full-time organiser for the Connolly Association in his last year there. 

He became interested in politics while at University College Cork, mainly through his reading in history and economics. He first spoke in public during his first undergraduate year, 1953, in support of a motion at the student debating society in UCC, the “Phil” (Philosophical Society): “That this house supports Dr Mohammad Mossadegh”. Mossadegh was the Iranian Prime Minister who nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and was overthrown in the British and US-organised coup that installed the Shah Pahlevi government in Iran. In 1956 he helped establish a student branch of the Irish Labour Party at UCC, together with his then friends and fellow students Michael O’Leary, Barry Desmond and Callaghan O’Herlihy. They called it the Pádraig O Conaire branch, after the Irish-language writer who was a supporter of the Labour Party, and they produced the branch “manifesto” in Irish as well as English. Michael O’Leary (1936-2006) subsequently became leader of the Labour Party and was Tanaiste in Garret FitzGerald’s Coalition Government in the 1980s, before leaving Labour to join Fine Gael. Barry Desmond also became a Labour TD, a Minister for Health and head of the European Union Court of Auditors. Cal O’Herlihy taught economics in Cambridge University and Queen’s University, Belfast, before setting up a business marketing consultancy in London.  Coughlan spent three years in the Labour Party, 1956-58, while a student.  He served on Labour’s Cork Constituency Council and was a delegate to two of the party’s annual conferences in that time. This was his only involvement in party politics and he spent the rest of his life in political pressure groups of one kind or another.

CONNOLLY ASSOCIATION

While in London from 1958 to 1961 he became active in the Connolly Association and Irish Self-Determination League, which was seeking at the time to make British Labour and trade union circles aware of the anti-Catholic discrimination and denial of civil liberties that then prevailed under the Unionist majority Government in Stormont, Belfast.  The Connolly Association had been established as the Connolly Club/Clubs in 1938. Its activity in opposing the Stormont regime was based on its modern Constitution, which it adopted in 1955 and which it operated under until it formally ceased activity in 2023. Its two main objectives were to defend the interests of the Irish community in Britain and to win the British Labour movement to a progressive policy on Ireland. The Association’s work from 1955 onward was a significant factor in influencing the British Labour Government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson to put pressure on the Unionist administration of Captain Terence O’Neill to concede civil rights reforms in face of the demands of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement in 1968/9. Coughlan was active in the Connolly Association during his three years in London and became its full-time organiser in his last year there. During that year, 1960-61, the Association succeeded in getting over half the members of the British Parliamentary Labour Party to sign a series of telegrams to Unionist Premier Lord Brookeborough urging the release of the republican political internees from Crumlin Road Prison, Belfast.  Many of these had been interned for several years without charge or trial by the Unionist regime under the then Northern Ireland Government’s Special Powers Act following the IRA Border campaign of the late 1950s. 

Coughlan was much influenced in his views by the labour historian C. Desmond Greaves (1913-1988), who edited the Connolly Association’s monthly paper, the Irish Democrat, from 1948 until 1988 and who advanced the idea of a civil rights movement as the way to undermine Unionist political hegemony in Northern Ireland. When Coughlan returned to work in Ireland in 1961 Desmond Greaves asked him to become Dublin correspondent for the Irish Democrat and he sent that paper regular political commentary for the next forty years, until it ceased regular publication in the early 2000s. Greaves was a remarkable man – a natural scientist, politician, historian and poet, as well as a newspaper editor.  Coughlan regarded him as the most intelligent and learned person he met in the course of his life. Unbeknownst to Greaves he kept a record of the latter’s table-talk over the years because of what he regarded as its high quality, and he has edited this for publication (See this on the website: www.desmondgreavesarchive.com).  Greaves, who was unmarried and had no children, made Coughlan his heir and literary executor, and he in turn has left Greaves’s two-million-word Journal, which he edited, as well as theTable-Talk and  Greaves’s letters and research papers to the National Library of Ireland through his own literary executor, the historian Dr Ruan O’Donnell of the University of Limerick, to whom he has willed the copyright of Greaves’s books and unpublished writings. Together with some Dublin friends and admirers of Greaves’s work he established the annual Desmond Greaves Weekend Summer School in 1989, which still continues, and he has acted as secretary to its committee over that time. 

TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

Anthony Coughlan was appointed a lecturer in Social Policy at TCD in 1961, his having taken economics in his BA at UCC, his Diploma in Social Policy from London, and his knowledge of the Irish and British social service scene being considered relevant to teaching social policy, then termed social administration, in a new degree course that was being established for intending social workers in Trinity’s Department of Social Studies at the time.  In due course he became Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Head of Department and was responsible for the establishment at TCD of a separate degree course in his academic field of social policy. In the mid-1960s he conducted, together with Professor Geoffrey Bourke of UCD’s School of Medicine, a survey of Dublin’s general and paediatric hospitals, which showed the high degree of misallocation of patients in these institutions, as judged by the levels of medical and nursing care they were receiving at the time the two researchers visited them. That situation remained substantially unchanged nearly sixty years later and is significantly responsible for the continuing problem of patients having to wait for long periods on trolleys in Ireland’s hospital corridors before proper hospital admission because of bed blockages (See Dublin General Hospital and Geriatric Study, 1966, and Dublin Hospital Paediatric Study, 1969, sponsored by the Medical Research Council of Ireland – the latter publication co-authored with J.W. McGilvray).  Coughlan wrote a number of articles on social policy issues in professional journals over the years and he was a conscientious teacher and popular with his students, some of whom later became well known in Irish public service and social work circles (e.g. Irish Government Secretary Dermot McCarthy, broadcaster Joe Duffy, EU Commission Secretary-General David O’Sullivan and UK social policy academics Jonathan Bradshaw and Paddy Hillyard). Apart from the hospital surveys mentioned, his academic research work was modest, largely because of his involvement in external political activity. He took early retirement from TCD in 1999 at the age of 63. TCD Senior Lecturer grade, which was his at the time he retired, became titled “Associate Professor” some years later.

WOLFE TONE SOCIETY

In 1964 Coughlan joined the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society, which had been set up the year before to mark the two hundredth anniversary of Wolfe Tone’s birth and whose members decided to continue in being afterwards. This consisted of a couple of dozen people and functioned as what he termed “a kind of Green Fabian Society”, in which various independent Republicans interacted with local radicals and left-wingers. He became its assistant-secretary and then secretary until the end of the 1960s.  While Coughlan did not join either Sinn Fein or the IRA, his involvement with the Wolfe Tone Society enabled him to form good personal and political relations with the key Republican leaders of the time.  The Society was one of the influences on the politicisation of the Cathal Goulding-led Republican Movement during the 1960s by encouraging Republican involvement in political campaigns on such issues as Dublin ground rents and housing standards, preserving the Taylor’s Hall, supporting the small- farm cooperative movement in the West, campaigning on the Irish language and civil liberties issues, defending Irish neutrality and opposing the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement and Irish membership of the European Economic Community (EEC), known then as the Common Market, for which Ireland initially applied in 1961.  Through his personal contacts and his involvement with the Wolfe Tone Society Coughlan played a part in encouraging Republican support for, and participation in, the 1960s Northern Civil Rights Movement and in the foundation of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in January/April 1967. He attended the two foundation meetings of the NICRA as an observer from the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society. He also walked in the first Northern Ireland civil rights march from Coalisland to Dungannon on 24 August 1968 and he was present as an observer from the Dublin Society at the Duke Street, Derry, demonstration on 5 October 1968, the attack on which by the then RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) brought the deplorable civil liberties situation in Northern Ireland to world attention. 

The lack of civil liberties in Northern Ireland was Coughlan’s particular political interest in the 1960s. This reflected his continual contact with Desmond Greaves and the Connolly Association in Britain, as well as Greaves’s interaction in turn with Messrs Goulding, Garland and MacGiolla amongst the Republicans, and with Betty Sinclair, full-time secretary of the Belfast Trades Council, and other Northern Ireland Trade Unionists. The latter were mostly communists, but of Protestant background, and were among the few from that community who were willing to champion Catholic/nationalist grievances at the time.  The politicizing Republicans and these Northern Ireland Trade Unionists were the two principal political elements that came together to establish the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1967. A few independent Northern nationalists were also involved.

In later life Coughlan regretted that instead of seeking to encourage the politicisation of the Republican Movement in the 1960s – although he regarded that as a broadly positive development – he did not concentrate his political efforts on seeking to make the Irish Labour Movement and Labour Party republican, something which James Connolly had sought to do in his day, which Desmond Greaves had consistently advocated the desirability of, and which he considered with hindsight would probably have achieved more politically fruitful long-term results. He held the view that the Irish Labour Party’s “anti-national” tradition and its opportunistic desire on several occasions to get into government office with Fine Gael at all costs, so reviving that party in government and enabling Fianna Fail to revive in opposition, have been primarily responsible for bringing Labour to its current pitiful state in Irish politics. Although he acted as Dublin correspondent of the “Irish Democrat” in the decades following his going to work in Dublin, Coughlan followed an independent political course over that time. He never discussed or concerted his political activity in Ireland with Desmond Greaves or any other external source. 

Coughlan was one of the foundational committee members of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement when it was established in 1964.  He was the first friend and political colleague in Ireland of Kader Asmal, the Indian South African who initiated this development, together with his English wife Louise, when Asmal came to work as a law lecturer at Trinity College. Asmal later became Minister for Water and Forests in Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid government and was South Africa’s Minister for Education in its successor.   

EU OPPONENT

Coughlan’s first political action when he came to work in Dublin in 1961 was to organise a collective letter criticising the Irish Government’s application to join the then European Economic Community (EEC), which was made in that year. This letter called for “a more critical public appraisal” of the Government’s policy. It was signed by his then friend Barry Desmond, by Michael Mullen TD, Dr Noel Browne TD, Sean Keating RHA and others, and was carried in the Irish Times on 12 February 1962.  He opposed European integration on democratic and internationalist grounds and regarded the attempt to turn the EEC/EC, later the EU, into an entity with the characteristics of a supranational European Federation as, inter alia, an attempt by Europe’s former imperialist States to become a big power in the world collectively when they could no longer be so individually. European supranationalism subordinated the interests of the States involved to American foreign policy and helped to free the EU-based Big Companies and Banks from democratic control by Europe’s Nation States, Governments and Parliaments.  He saw this development as an assault on democracy and political independence at the national level and as likely to make the national question, the issue of national democracy and independence, the central issue of European politics for decades, not least for the big European countries that traditionally had caused national problems for others, including Ireland. He believed that this would remain the case until the EC/EU broke apart as an essentially irrational political construct – an outcome that he regarded as inevitable. He regarded talk of “pooling” State sovereignty by the EU’s proponents as cover for an actual surrender of sovereignty, and was confident that this would generate a popular reaction in the countries concerned in time, as people came to realise what had happened.  He wrote a number of theoretical articles on the subject of nationality, the nation state and democracy, and regularly engaged in polemics against European supranational integration from 1961 onward.

The Wolfe Tone Society campaigned against the 1965 Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement, which the Government regarded as a step towards preparing Ireland for EEC membership. When the application by the UK and Ireland to join the EEC was revived at the end of the 1960s following the death of France’s President Charles De Gaulle, a politician whom Coughlan greatly admired, he became joint-secretary, together with the economist the late Raymond Crotty, of the Common Market Study Group and later the Common Market Defence Campaign. The Dublin Wolfe Tone Society initiated these bodies with a view to drawing new forces into opposing EEC membership.  In 1970 the Republican Movement split between Provisionals and Officials because of Northern Ireland events, and this encouraged Coughlan to concentrate primarily on EC/EU matters from then on, rather than on the Northern Ireland problem.  The pamphlets produced by the Common Market Study Group and the Defence Campaign provided much of the argumentation that the No-side forces used in the 1972 referendum campaign on Ireland’s accession to the then EEC. As a key EU-critical ideologue Coughlan liaised closely with Michael Mullen, General Secretary of the ITGWU, with Ruairi Roberts, General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, and with Justin Keating TD and Brendan Halligan of the Labour Party in campaigning for a No vote in the lead-up to Ireland’s EEC Accession Treaty referendum on 10 May 1972.  He debated the issue of EEC membership with Dr Garret FitzGerald, Ireland’s best-known Europhile at the time, on numerous occasions at meetings round the country during what was a vigorously fought referendum campaign. He later remarked that while the No-side usually won these public debates, as judged by the votes that were sometimes taken at their end, when it came to the actual referendum poll the Irish people generally said to themselves that if Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, traditional political antagonists, were united in recommending a Yes vote to joining the EEC, then that must be a good thing; so that the referendum outcome for Yes corresponded to the combined vote of the State’s two main political parties at the time.          

The Common Market Study Group and Common Market Defence Campaign were the first of a series of political pressure groups that Coughlan helped to establish and run over the next fifty years. These bodies provided critical argumentation against supranational European integration and encouraged parallel anti-EC/EU activity amongst interests on the left, right and centre of Irish politics in the nine constitutional referendums on European Treaties that Ireland held between 1972 and 2012. They were titled, respectively, the Irish Sovereignty Movement – in the period following Ireland’s EEC Accession in 1973 – which also campaigned for British moves on Irish reunification; the Constitutional Rights Campaign  in the 1987 Single European Act referendum; then Amárach (Tomorrow); then the National Platform in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and the 1998 Amsterdam Treaty referendums; and then the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre in the two Nice Treaty referendums of 2001 and 2002 and the two Lisbon Treaty referendums of 2008 and 2009.  This body is still in existence. 

Coughlan was secretary and principal spokesman of all these bodies, which operated through holding occasional public meetings, producing documentation for EU-critical activists, sending material to the media and developing contacts with likeminded interests in other countries that were opposed to the EU.  He sought to develop good relations with people on all sides of the political spectrum in Ireland who were concerned at different aspects of EU integration, providing arguments and data on issues of EU law and fact, on which he became a leading EU-critical authority.  He held that for democrats the issue of national democracy and national independence should transcend traditional left-right divisions in countries that did not have real independence. This stance made him politically persona grata to EU-critics on the political Left, in Republican circles and amongst Irish neutrality advocates, as well as to Catholic traditionalists on the political Right who were concerned at the EC/EU involving itself in fundamental rights matters.  While there was never any formal alliance between these different groups in Ireland’s successive EU referendum campaigns, and no question of their coming under one political umbrella, the fact that they tended to sing from substantially the same “hymn-sheet”, with political themes and arguments provided to a large extent by the bodies Coughlan belonged to, encouraged maximum involvement by people of different EU-critical views on these occasions. It was Coughlan’s view that this parallel or coordinated activity by interests on the political Left, Right and Centre, something that he always sought to encourage, was a necessary precondition of the No-side victories in the 2001 Nice Treaty referendum and the 2008 Lisbon Treaty referendum.

THE CROTTY CASE, 1986/1987 

Coughlan was himself substantially responsible for these referendums being held and for the Irish people being enabled to vote on successive EC/EU Treaties by the part he played in initiating the 1986-7 Crotty case before the Irish High Court and Supreme Court. The Crotty case stemmed from the Irish Government’s decision in 1986 to seek to ratify the Single European Act (SEA) treaty by simple parliamentary majority in the Oireachtas. Under Ireland’s Constitution this is the normal way of ratifying treaties that do not entail a surrender of popular sovereignty. The SEA was different, however. It was the biggest step towards further European integration since the Treaty of Rome established the then EEC in 1957. It gave the European Community its single internal market and introduced the widespread use of majority voting on the EC Council of Ministers for that purpose. It also indicated support in principle for a European economic and monetary union and for Brussels involvement in human rights matters. Ratifying it clearly entailed a surrender of sovereignty by Ireland.

Coughlan and his colleagues sought to defeat the Single European Act politically before resorting to legal action. Ireland was the last EEC Member State to seek to ratify the SEA treaty, as the Irish ratification had been delayed by a Divorce referendum in June 1986, in which voters had rejected the legalisation of divorce. In the following months a strong campaign against the SEA in Labour and Trade Union circles opened the likely prospect that the Labour Party annual conference that year would reject the treaty. This could have brought down the then Fine Gael-Labour Coalition Government of Garret FitzGerald and Dick Spring and would certainly have produced a political crisis, as Fianna Fail in opposition was critical of aspects of the SEA, and Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey’s assistant, Dr Martin Mansergh, met with Coughlan on several occasions about the matter. The Labour Party leadership used the excuse of a trade dispute amongst cleaners at Cork City Hall, where the party’s annual conference was due to be held, to postpone that event. In early December 1986 the Labour Party’s TDs then voted to ratify the SEA treaty in the Dáil, without the party’s members being allowed a say through their annual conference.  

In late 1986 Coughlan organised a collective letter to the Irish Times, signed by TCD law lecturer Kader Asmal, Seamus Ó Tuathail BL and others, criticising the State’s proposed mode of ratification of the SEA by simple parliamentary majority.  Its signatories contended that only the Irish people themselves, as the repositories of State sovereignty, could make the requisite surrenders of sovereignty involved in this new European treaty by approving its ratification by referendum. This letter attracted the attention of Paul Callan SC in the Law Library, who approached Seamus Ó Tuathail and said he thought he had a good point in this.  Another young lawyer, Antonia O’Callaghan, showed an interest also. There followed several days’ study by Callan of the Single European Act before he was convinced that he had a statable case, at the end of which he said: Now where is the client?  Having initially thought of offering himself as plaintiff, Coughlan asked his friend the economist Raymond Crotty, whom he knew was a strong critic of the treaty, whether he would take the case and Crotty readily agreed. He was a more suitable person as an established married man with a family, and a distinguished economist, to take such an action than Coughlan himself would have been at the time.

Coming up to Christmas 1986 Raymond Crotty’s counsel applied to the High Court for a Declaration that the State could not be bound by the provisions of the SEA Treaty unless it had first been approved by a referendum of the people. They also applied for an injunction restraining the Government from depositing the instrument of ratification of the SEA in Rome – that being the final step in the treaty ratification process –  without holding such a referendum first. All the other EEC States had by then ratified the SEA and, as mentioned above, the Dáil and Seanad had purported to ratify it by majority vote.  In the course of Crotty’s injunction application Ireland’s then President, Patrick Hillery, signed into law the Bill implementing the domestic provisions of the SEA, thereby indicating that he as President had no doubts regarding the Bill’s constitutionality; for otherwise he would have been constitutionally obliged to refer it to the Court for testing. This put considerable pressure on the judge hearing Crotty’s injunction application. 

On Christmas Eve 1986, High Court Justice Mr Donal Barrington granted Raymond Crotty’s application. It was the first item on the news that Christmas Day.  The judge decided that Crotty had made a plausible case that his constitutional rights as an Irish citizen would be permanently affected if the SEA Treaty should come into force without a referendum, and that there should be a full trial of the validity of his claims. In January 1987 a trial of the substantive action took place before a three-judge High Court, which Crotty lost on grounds of his alleged lack of locus standi.  The High Court ruled that Crotty had not shown that his personal rights would be irreversibly affected by the coming into force of the SEA.  There followed an appeal by Crotty’s counsel to the five-judge Supreme Court, at the commencement of which Supreme Court Justice  Brian Walsh remarked that Mr Crotty’s locus standi was that of the proverbial Dutch boy standing with his finger in the dyke to hold back the flood – in this case the resulting future flood of supranational European laws. In April 1987 the Supreme Court found in Crotty’s favour in a majority, three-two, judgement, following which the new Haughey-led Fianna Fail Government – that had come into office between the High Court and Supreme Court stages of the Crotty case – held a constitutional referendum in May 1987 permitting the State to ratify the SEA, which was duly done. This whole affair delayed the coming into force of the Single European Act by six months. (See a more detailed note on the Crotty judgement of the Irish Supreme Court in Appendix 1 below.)

Irish referendums on subsequent EC/EU Treaties have all stemmed from the Crotty case, for Irish Governments have known that if they failed to hold such they would face another Crotty-style constitutional challenge. That is the reason why Ireland was the only one of the 28 EU Member States to hold a referendum on the European Union’s Constitution, brought into being by the Treaty of Lisbon, in 2008 and 2009. 

THE McKENNA CASE, 1995      

In view of the positive public attitudes to European integration that most Irish voters still held at the time of the 1987 SEA referendum, that Treaty would almost certainly have been approved without difficulty in the referendum on it; but to make assurance doubly sure the Charles Haughey-led Government of the day decided to spend public money, which came from opponents as well as supporters of the SEA, on a large-scale advertising campaign urging a Yes vote.  No previous Irish Government had ever spent public money in this one-sided way in a constitutional referendum.  When it was proposed to repeat this partisan use of taxpayers’ funds in the June 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty on European Union – which introduced the euro-currency – Coughlan organised a legal challenge to the constitutionality of this action. Patricia McKenna, a part-time art teacher at the time, agreed to act as plaintiff on this occasion. She lost her case in the High Court and as the Maastricht referendum vote was only a few days away, her legal team decided not to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court.  Three years later, however, in 1995, Patricia McKenna, having in the interim been elected a Green Party MEP for Dublin, bravely revived her constitutional challenge to the partisan use of public money in the context of that year’s Divorce Referendum. She did this even though she personally, and her party, were in favour of divorce.  Paul Callan SC and Seamus Ó Tuathail BL were again the principal barristers on this occasion, and Coughlan was intimately involved in preparing documentation on international referendum practice for use by counsel in the case, although he took no public position on the specific issue of divorce as such. 

In November 1995, just a week before the Divorce poll, the Supreme Court gave Patricia McKenna a legal victory by ruling that it was unconstitutional of the Government to use public money to seek to obtain a particular result in a referendum. As a result the Government had immediately to withdraw its extensive Yes-side advertisements from the newspapers on the weekend before the poll.  In this new context, with just five days to go to the vote, party political broadcasts on radio and television became vitally important for the Government and the Yes-side forces. As all the Dáil political parties were in favour of divorce, this led to a total of 42 minutes of free broadcasting time being allocated to the Yes side as compared with 10 minutes to non-party No-side groups in the four days coming up to the referendum. The Divorce referendum was narrowly carried, the Yes-side having a majority of only one half of one percent (c.10,000 votes) over the Nos. While most objectively-minded people would accept that the Yes-side had won the Divorce referendum by unconstitutional means – namely the one-sided Government advertising that had taken place, not to speak of the breaches of the provisions of the Broadcasting Acts by the State broadcaster (RTE), as was established five years later (see note on the Coughlan case below) – the Supreme Court declined to “go behind the mind of the people” and overthrow the referendum result in the appeal against the validity of that which was made by the late Senator Des Hanafin. Coughlan acted as an “expert witness” for Hanafin in this appeal, dealing with the issue of unconstitutional Governmental advertising in the context of the Divorce referendum. 

OVERTURNING THE NICE ONE REFERENDUM IN 2002 … THE REFERENDUM COMMISSION

The response of the Irish Government to the Supreme Court’s 1995 McKenna judgement was to legislate for the establishment of a statutory Referendum Commission which would be charged with drawing up two statements for the information of voters in future referendums: one statement that would tell citizens what the purpose of the referendum was, and the other that would set out the main arguments for and against the proposed constitutional amendment in a fair and balanced fashion.  This original Referendum Commission was not a permanent body but was established anew with a new chairman every time there was a referendum – it was replaced in 2024 by a permanent Commission responsible for overseeing elections as well as referendums. The Referendum Commission was first called into being under the 1998 Referendum Act to deal with the Amsterdam Treaty and Good Friday Agreement referendums, both of which were held on the same day in May that year. Three years later, in 2001, when it came to the referendum on the European Community’s Nice Treaty the Referendum Commission, then still chaired by retired former Chief Justice T.A. Finlay, who had chaired it since its inception, invited Anthony Coughlan on behalf of the National Platform and Alan Dukes on behalf of the European Movement-Ireland to have their respective organisations mentioned in the Yes/No booklet which the Commission was sending to all Irish households, as bodies that would provide factual information on each side of the argument. This led Coughlan, whose home in Drumcondra, Dublin, was the accommodation address of the National Platform, to instal two extra telephone lines manned by volunteers to deal with the No-side queries that flowed in. The European Movement operated from a city-centre office with reportedly a paid full-time staff and a bank of telephones. 

The fact that in the Nice One referendum there was for the first time significant money behind the arguments of the No-side through the advertisements of the Referendum Commission, as well as the fact that key Yes-side and No-side organisations were officially listed in the manner mentioned in the Commission’s information booklet that was posted to all voting households, were influential factors in giving the No-side victory in June 2001. However, the Bertie Ahern Government of the day immediately assured the other EU States that it would not accept the referendum result but would re-run the referendum to permit the Nice Treaty to be ratified. 

To help overthrow the Nice One referendum result in 2002, the Government withdrew from the Referendum Commission its function of setting out the main arguments for and against proposed changes to the Constitution. This was done by an amendment to the Referendum Act that was put through all stages of the legislative process in the Oireachtas in a single day – on the last day before the Dáil and Seanad rose for the Christmas Holidays in December 2001. The amendment was proposed with just one day’s notice to the Opposition, when most people were thinking about the Christmas festivities, so that it went virtually unnoticed by the local media. Fine Gael and Labour voted against this amendment, which was however carried by Fianna Fail and Progressive Democrat votes in the Oireachtas.

Even though the Referendum Commission was thus deprived of its function of setting out the Yes-side and No-side arguments, it was still left with its function of informing citizens what the referendum was about. In the Nice One referendum in 2001 the proposition before citizen-voters was whether they approved or not the ratification of the Treaty of Nice. In Nice Two in 2002, however, the Government added to the amendment permitting ratification of Nice a wholly unrelated amendment providing that the State would have to hold a referendum before it could join any future EU defence pact. This was done as concerns regarding Irish neutrality had influenced many No-side voters in Nice One. This second amendment was joined to the amendment permitting ratification of Nice as one single proposition, so that voters had to vote simultaneously either Yes or No to these two quite different propositions in a single vote.  This procedure was constitutionally dubious in itself, but no one came forward to challenge it.  In turn the Referendum Commission had the function in Nice Two of telling citizen-voters what this joint amendment signified. Thus, whereas in Nice One the Yes/No advertisements of the Referendum Commission helped the No side by  putting public money behind their arguments for the first time, in Nice Two the Referendum Commission’s function of telling citizens what the referendum was about helped to pile up votes for the Yes-side; for if citizens voted to ratify Nice they would also be inserting this neutrality amendment, which most voters approved of, into the Constitution, whereas if they rejected Nice they would be rejecting the accompanying neutrality amendment. The Referendum Commission’s advertising campaign on what the referendum was about drew attention to these crucial points, which tended to favour the Yes side.

As an incentive to induce voters concerned about the possible effect of the Nice Treaty on Irish neutrality to vote to ratify that treaty the second time round, the Government gave a commitment in Nice Two to the so-called “Triple Lock”, namely that Irish troops, over 12 in number, would not take part in  military missions abroad unless they had the approval of the Irish Government, the Irish Parliament and United Nations through a vote of either the Security Council or the General Assembly. This Triple Lock commitment was embodied in Ireland’s “National Declaration” in the second Nice Treaty referendum – a unique and solemn statement by the Irish State, which was responded to by the Seville Declaration of the other EU Member States and was duly notified to the United Nations when the Nice Treaty was registered there. This Triple Lock commitment, set out in this National Declaration, was implicitly without any time limit.

While unsurprised at the Government’s chicanery in removing the Yes/No function at such short notice from the Referendum Commission, with most people being unaware of what was happening, Coughlan regretted that this progressive policy follow-on from the McKenna judgement, although not a legally necessary one, had thereby been eliminated.  He believed that a fair setting-out of the arguments for and against proposed constitutional amendments that were objectively grounded in their text would have been a valuable instrument of public political education in Irish referendums generally, regardless of their content. Moreover, the fact that public money was used to publicise the Yes-side and No-side arguments on an equal basis through the advertisements of the Referendum Commission in the Amsterdam Treaty and Nice One referendums meant that private interests, especially on the Yes side in EU-related referendums, spent less money than they otherwise would. However, the removal of the Yes/No function from the Referendum Commission encouraged a flood of private money in the Nice Two and the later Lisbon Treaty referendums.  This was overwhelmingly on the Yes side by a factor which Coughlan estimated as easily ten to one on these occasions. 

The character of the Yes-side campaign in the second Nice Treaty referendum may be gauged from a comment by leading journalist James Downey, himself a supporter of the Treaty, who reported in one of his weekly Irish Independent columns at the time that a leading local politician had said to him: “We must unleash terror on the Irish people.” 

Worth noting also is the fact that in all Irish constitutional referendums following those on the Nice Treaty  – for instance in the two referendums on the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon in 2008 and 2009 –  the respective Referendum Commissions were chaired by serving High Court judges who were open to promotion to the Irish Supreme Court or the EU Court of Justice because of Government patronage, rather than by retired judges with no such prospects. This tended to make the Referendum Commissions pliant instruments of Government policy on these occasions – at least when the issues were particularly contentious and the Government politicians of the day had strong views on the outcome  that they wanted.  

THE COUGHLAN CASE, 2000

Coughlan took no public position on Ireland’s various “moral referendums” on divorce and abortion that were held in the 1980s and 1990s, believing that to do so would divide potential EU-critical opinion.  He contended however that the allocation of free broadcasts to the larger political parties on these occasions raised similar issues of democracy and the equality of citizens in referendums as had been raised in the McKenna case. Such broadcasts had used publicly financed resources to benefit the Yes side in the 1972 EEC Accession Treaty, the 1987 Single European Act and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty referendums because the larger Dáil parties that favoured a Yes vote were given free broadcasting time. Fianna Fail as the largest Dáil party was usually given seven or so minutes of free broadcasting time on these occasions, Fine Gael four minutes, Labour two to three minutes, and small political parties with fewer than seven TDs were denied any free broadcasts at all. Coughlan held that this imbalance of radio and TV broadcasts was both unconstitutional and in breach of the statutory provisions of the Broadcasting Acts, which require broadcasters at all times to be fair, impartial and objective in their coverage of issues of public controversy and debate. Such a requirement clearly implied that there should be a broad equality of free broadcast treatment of both sides on contentious referendum issues.  

Arising from the 42 minutes/10 minutes imbalance of free broadcasting time in the 1995 Divorce referendum, Coughlan complained to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, which adjudicated at the time on public complaints made under the Broadcasting Acts. Having been “given the run around” for some 18 months by the Complaints Commission, to use the words of Mrs Justice Catherine McGuinness before whom he sought judicial review of the legality of the Commission’s rejection of his complaint, his lawyers was given leave for such a review.  There followed a trial of the action in the High Court, in which Coughlan’s old friend from the Crotty and McKenna cases, Paul Callan SC, invited Michael McDowell SC to make the main pleadings, with Seamus Ó Tuathail BL and Diarmaid Rossa Phelan BL assisting – the lawyers acting on a pro bono publico basis. In 1998 the single-judge High Court (Carney J.) upheld Coughlan’s contention that the Broadcasting Complaints Commission had incorrectly interpreted its statutory obligations under the Broadcasting Acts in the Divorce referendum and that Coughlan’s view of the matter was valid. 

RTE Management at the time did not at first wish to appeal the High Court decision to the Supreme Court, as its members had no special attachment to party political broadcasts. They were however pressed by some of Coughlan’s old EU opponents on the then RTE Authority – former Taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald and Europhile trade unionists Desmond Geraghty and Billy Attley – to appeal the judgement to the Supreme Court. The Government through the Attorney General joined itself to RTE and the Broadcasting Complaints Commission as a notice party to this action. Donal O’Donnell SC replaced Michael McDowell SC in making the pleadings for Coughlan in the latter stages of this case.  Important issues were at stake.  The lawyers for Coughlan’s opponents argued that the Irish political parties as organisers and articulators of public opinion had a right to special broadcasting facilities to enable them to communicate with the public in referendums. If the Supreme Court had agreed with this line of argument it would not only have sanctioned free broadcasts for the political parties on these occasions, but would have opened a legal way round the McKenna judgement by enabling public funds to be given to political parties in referendums as well. In the event, in January 2000, the Supreme Court in a four-to-one judgement, with Barrington J. dissenting, upheld the High Court judgement in favour of Coughlan by laying down that both the Constitution and the Broadcasting Acts require equality of free broadcasting time in referendums. This requirement can of course be met by having no such broadcasts at all on these occasions, as has been RTE’s practice since.

On two subsequent occasions the Broadcasting Complaints Commission upheld complaints that Anthony Coughlan made arising from his EU concerns.  In 2007 the Dublin office of the EU Commission spent some €360,000 on a series of broadcasts on Irish local and community radio stations, ostensibly advertising the existence of a Citizens’ Information Service on the EU, but prefacing them with loaded statements on how Ireland had allegedly benefited from EU membership. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission agreed with Coughlan’s contention that most of these statements amounted to political advertising that was designed to influence the voting behaviour of citizens, and as such that they were in breach of Ireland’s statutory ban on such advertisements. Patricia McKenna MEP also complained separately about the same matter. If these complaints by Coughlan and McKenna had not been made and upheld, there can be little doubt that the EU Commission would have extended such advertising beyond local radio stations to Irish national radio and possibly national TV in the Lisbon Treaty referendum on the proposed EU Constitution that was expected in the following year, 2008. 

The second occasion was a complaint that Coughlan made against a “Wide Angle” programme on the Newstalk 106 station during the second Lisbon Treaty referendum in 2009, when there was an imbalance of some six contributors to one in favour of the Yes side, and the programme presenter also leant heavily to that side. This was but one of a whole series of one-sided partisan broadcasts by Newstalk 106 during that referendum.  

A CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION: THE LISBON TREATY 2008 -2009

In 2004 the Member State Governments decided to abolish the European Community, which had been the repository of supranational powers up to then and transfer those

powers to a constitutionally new European Union that would be endowed with legal personality for the first time and have the form of a European Federation. This was the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. Article 1 of this treaty, which laid down that “…this Constitution establishes the European Union”, showed that such an entity with legal personality had not existed before, although the name “European Union” had been popularised since the 1992 Maastricht “Treaty on European Union” as referring to the foreign policy and crime and justice areas of Member State policy, which were dealt with “intergovernmentally” rather than supranationally. In 2005 an analysis that Coughlan wrote of this Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, was translated into Czech and published with a lengthy preface by Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who was opposed to the EU Constitution. This was followed by an invitation to Coughlan to speak on this treaty in summer 2005 at the Centre for Economics and Politics, Prague, at which President Klaus presided. Several hundred people were present for the occasion, which was held in the Automobile Club, Prague, including, Coughlan was told, seveal foreign ambassadors.  President Klaus remarked that he had no disagreement with any of Coughlan’s answers following a question-and-answer session that followed the lecture. 

When French and Dutch voters rejected the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe in referendums in 2005, the Member State Governments decided to repackage 99% of its content in the form of amendments to the existing treaties rather than as stand-alone provisions that voters could easily understand. And they decided to allow no more popular referendums. This repackaged EU constitutional treaty was brought into force by the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon. Ireland was the only EU Member State country to hold a referendum on that, for its Brian Cowen-led Fianna Fail Government knew that failure to hold such would lead to a Crotty-style legal challenge in the Irish courts that would almost certainly have succeeded. 

As well as transferring the supranational powers of the European Community to the newly constituted European Union, the Lisbon Treaty put foreign and security policy and crime and justice policy on a supranational basis for the first time. Thus Lisbon brought all areas of public policy within the ambit of the post-Lisbon EU.  Lisbon also gave the European Court of Justice power to decide on human rights. This last step has great potential for enabling that Court to extend supranational federal powers further by judicial fiat – as US history shows has happened with the American Supreme Court there. The word “Constitution” did not appear in the Lisbon Treaty, as that might have alerted people to the fact that Lisbon was the founding treaty of a constitutionally quite new European Union. Lisbon was in effect the Treaty “of” European Union rather than “on” European Union, although that was not explicitly stated – in contrast to the constitutional treaty that Lisbon was replacing.  The only significant provisions of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe that were not transferred by the Lisbon Treaty were those providing for the twelve-star EU flag and for making Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy the EU anthem. Mention of these traditional State symbols in the new treaty would too readily have alerted people to the constitutional revolution that was taking place by stealth and without the citizens of the EU Member States being permitted to hold referendums on it. Thus the EU flag and anthem have no EU treaty base to this day, although that has not prevented their widespread use.  

Although endowed with a Federal Constitution, the post-Lisbon EU does not yet have all the features of a fully-fledged State. It does not have its own army and, while it is financed by indirect taxes, it does not impose direct taxes. It does not need a new treaty to acquire these key features of statehood, however. The EU Constitution has provision for them if its Member State Governments unanimously agree.  Federal States often take long periods to acquire full statehood – two centuries in the case of the USA, plus a civil war. Thus from the inside the EU looks like an arrangement between States; from the outside it looks like a State itself. 

Having given the new European Union its constitutional base, the Lisbon Treaty then gave each citizen of the EU Member States a second, “additional”, citizenship of the Union established by the Treaty (Art.20 TFEU). One can only be a citizen of a State and all States consist of their citizens.  In the post-Lisbon EU everyone therefore has two real citizenships, at the national level and the federal Brussels level, with citizen’s rights and duties at each level, just as in such classical Federations as the USA or Germany. State sovereignty in the EU, as in classical federations, is divided between the national level and the Brussels level, and if there is any conflict between the rights or duties of citizens at either level, the EU level has legal primacy. The EU Court of Justice adjudicates on such matters.

Having given the post-Lisbon EU a Federal Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty went on to make a major power-political change in the interest of the big Member States. This was to provide that EU law-making henceforth should be based primarily on population size, just as in any State. Thus a qualified majority for making EU laws in the Council of Ministers post-Lisbon consists of 55% of the Member States – that is 15 out of 27 – as long as they comprise 65% of the EU’s population of some 450 million. This had the effect of doubling the relative voting weight of Germany, the EU’s largest country, from its pre-Lisbon level of 8% of the total number of votes on the Council of Ministers, to the current 16%. It increased the voting weight of France and Italy from 8% to 12% each and reduced the voting weight of small countries like Ireland and Denmark from 2% to just under 1% each.

Coughlan and his colleagues were strongly critical of the role played by the statutory Referendum Commission in the two Lisbon Treaty referendums. As mentioned above, that body since 2001 still had the job of informing citizen-voters what the referendums were about – in other words, how the changes proposed would affect the Irish Constitution. But in the two Lisbon Treaty referendums the Commission quite failed in its statutory obligation to do this.  It did not inform voters of the major constitutional changes described above, but rather disseminated tendentious information on aspects of the treaty that rarely touched on them. During the referendum campaign Declan Ganley’s Libertas organisation circulated several thousand copies of Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde’s “Readable Version of the EU Treaties as amended by Lisbon”in an endeavour to show what the treaty was really about.  However, the last thing the Yes-side wanted was attention being drawn to Lisbon’s radical constitutional content: how the Irish Constitution was being made wholly subordinate to a supranational Federal Constitution, and Irish citizens were being made citizens of a Federal-style EU, with all the implications of this for State sovereignty and peoples’ right to decide their rulers and make their own laws.  

Most of the Referendum Commission’s interventions in Lisbon Two were made by the judge-chairman in newspaper articles and broadcast question-and-answer sessions, even though under the Act that established it only the Commission’s full five members, acting collectively, were entitled to make interpretative statements of its content.  Again, no one came forward to challenge the constitutionality of this behaviour by the Referendum Commissioners, and in particular their chairmen on these occasions. In the second Lisbon Treaty referendum High Court Justice Mr Frank Clarke, a Fine Gael supporter, chaired the Referendum Commission and was egregious in his personal comments on the treaty. He was later promoted to the Supreme Court and in time became Chief Justice.  The European Union Constitution was thus ratified in Ireland by means of a monstrous campaign of deception of Irish voters. Today most Irish people – including much of the Irish media – have little idea of the character and implications of the new post-Lisbon European Union that now rules much of their lives.

Coughlan met Dr Garret FitzGerald, for decades Ireland’s best-known EU proponent,  in a gathering at a public lecture in Trinity College shortly before Dr FitzGerald’s death in 2011. They had frequently debated EC/EU issues in previous years. On greeting Coughlan the former Taoiseach wagged his finger facetiously and said, “You are the enemy.” It was a statement Coughlan was happy to take as a compliment from one of his main ideological opponents.

THE PRINGLE CASE, 2012

In 2012 Coughlan and a friend of his, Kevin McCorry, former organiser of the NICRA in Belfast, supported Donegal Independent TD Thomas Pringle in initiating a legal challenge to the constitutionality of Ireland subscribing over a billion euros, and regular sums if called upon thereafter, to the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). This was a cross-EU fund being set up to defend the euro-currency against speculative attacks.  Pringle and his lawyers contended that such a major long-term EU-related financial commitment called for a prior referendum in Ireland. They also contended that establishing the ESM was against the provisions of the EU treaties which forbade bank bailouts by national governments and was therefore illegal under EU law. Coughlan invited Cork solicitor Joe Noonan, whose submission on Irish foreign policy and neutrality had been crucial to the success of the 1987 Crotty action on the SEA, to act as solicitor for Thomas Pringle. He also raised some €30,000 from political sympathisers to assist solicitor Noonan meet the heavy expenses involved in conducting this action. In the event the Supreme Court ruled, with one judge, Hardiman, dissenting, that a referendum on the treaty establishing the ESM was not necessary in Ireland, but it referred the issues of EU law involved to the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg. This required Pringle’s lawyers to go before that court for a full hearing at which all 28 of its judges were present, as all EU Governments were concerned with the outcome – one of the few occasions that this has happened. Although it was clear from the court proceedings that some of the judges were sympathetic to Pringle’s case, the ECJ gives unitary judgements and that judgment was against him. However, the Irish Supreme Court decided that as he had raised important points of EU law and had nothing personally to gain by taking his action, it awarded Thomas Pringle his costs. This enabled Coughlan to return the £30,000 that he had raised to those supporters of Deputy Pringle who had originally contributed.

INTERNATIONAL WORK AND POLITICAL FRIENDSHIPS: BILL CASH MP AND JENS-PETER BONDE MEP

Anthony Coughlan’s work in Ireland on the EU made him widely known as a speaker and writer in EU-critical circles in Britain and across the continent.  In 1993 he was elected a Board member of the European Alliance of EU-critical Movements (TEAM), an international network of democratic EU-critical bodies. He was its chairman for some years and took part in several international conferences that it organised. In the 1990s and early 2000s he was an Advisory Board member of The European Journal, London, the principal intellectual organ of British Euro-criticism at the time, which had been established by Conservative MP Bill (Sir William) Cash, who was chairman of the House of Commons EU Scrutiny Committee, with whom he became personal friends.  

Coughlan was also a friend of and collaborator with Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde (1948-2021), who was Denmark’s best-known EU-critic for decades. Bonde had first come to Ireland to lend support at the time of the 1986/7 Crotty case. Coughlan assisted Bonde on various points in the latter’s editing of “Reader-Friendly Editions” of the Nice Treaty, the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, and the Lisbon Treaty, as well as Bonde’s lexicon of EU terms: euabc.eu.  In 2008 Bonde invited Coughlan to become President of the Foundation for EU Democracy, Brussels, a research think-tank attached to the EU Democrats European Parliament political party that Bonde then belonged to, with Bonde himself becoming its Vice-President; and Coughlan retained that position, which was unpaid, until the Foundation was wound up.

GEORGE GILMORE AND GERRY ADAMS

Anthony Coughlan was also a friend of the Protestant left-wing Republican George Gilmore (1898-1985), who with Peadar O’Donnell had been involved in the Irish War of Independence and was one of the founders of the Republican Congress in the 1930s. Gilmore had been Sean Lemass’s secretary in the years before the foundation of Fianna Fail. He recorded various reminiscences of Gilmore’s, which are available for researchers, as he had done with C. Desmond Greaves. Gilmore made him his literary executor and Coughlan was with him when he died.

Coughlan had no contact with the “Official” Republicans following the 1970 Republican split. He was opposed to the military campaign of the Provisional IRA, believing that it could not attain its desired aim of a united Ireland, although he did not criticise the Provisionals publicly.  In 1973 he received a letter from Northern Republican Gerry Adams, then a prisoner in Long Kesh and unknown to Coughlan or the general public at the time, seeking information on the Common Market/EEC. This began a decades-long relation, mainly an epistolary one and largely on Coughlan’s side, but with occasional meetings, in which he pushed the case for a political approach to completing the Irish national independence revolution and emphasised the futility of militarism.  He was sometimes invited to make suggestions for public speeches by Adams during that time. This was presumably one of the many influences on the Provisional leader’s thinking during this period. In various private memos to Adams, Coughlan urged that if he and his colleagues in Provisional Sinn Fein “went political” they should avoid at once the issues of the “liberal agenda”(viz. divorce, abortion, gay marriage, surrogacy, euthanasia), treating these as matters of private conscience, as well as  left-wing advocacy of “socialism”, and should stick to political Republicanism, namely advocacy of Irish independence and sovereignty vis-a-vis the EU and advocacy of national reunification vis-a-vis the UK, and seek to get the widest possible range of people to support these objectives. Unfortunately, this advice was not taken and Provisional Sinn Fein abandoned its earlier republican stance and became a pro-EU and anti-Brexit party at the time of the 2016 UK Brexit referendum. 

CAMPAIGN FOR AN INDEPENDENT BRITAIN

In 2021 Anthony Coughlan was made an honorary life-member of the Campaign for an Independent Britain (CIB), the longest-established network of EU-critical bodies in the UK, encompassing Conservative and Labour organisations, in recognition of his work for British democracy vis-a-vis the EU since the 1960s. The CIB presented him with a silver salver to honour his work on that occasion. Coughlan had been invited to campaign for the anti-EEC side in the UK’s first ever referendum, that held by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1975, two years after the UK and Ireland had together joined the then EEC, on whether the UK should remain an EEC member or not. On that occasion he spoke on a No-side platforms along with Labour’s Tony Benn at a meeting organised by the Connolly Association in Acton Town Hall, West London, and also with Labour’s Peter Shore and Conservative Sir Richard Body in the Beaver Hall, East London.  Forty years later he spoke in support of Brexit at meetings organised in London by the Campaign for an Independent Britain, the Bruges Group and the Campaign Against Euro-federalism, coming up to the 2016 UK Brexit referendum. On the weekend before the UK referendum vote, he took part with Frank Keoghan and others in a People’s Movement distribution of leaflets in support of Brexit on the Falls Road, Belfast.  Coughlan and his colleagues in the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre welcomed the Brexit result as a blow to EU supranationalism and as restoring control of their own Government to the British people. 

In his later years Coughlan concentrated on writing on EU matters and sorting and editing the Greaves, Gilmore, Connolly Association and Wolfe Tone Society records in his charge.  As C. Desmond Greaves’s literary executor he edited and compiled an index to Greaves’s two-million-word Journal for placing on the internet at www.desmondgreavesarchive.com  He was particularly pleased to edit Greaves’s Table Talk, which he was responsible for recording and collating and which he regarded as comparable in quality to that of Johnson, Coleridge and Goethe. This may also be read on the aforesaid website.  In 2021 Coughlan wrote a pamphlet on Hollowing Out Irish Independence: How the Irish people were made citizens of an EU Federation, advocating that Ireland should leave the EU as the UK had done and stating that this step was inevitable in time.  This was circulated to all Oireachtas members and sundry Irish media and opinion formers. He wrote a document, “In Defence of the Nation State: Nation, Nationalism, Internationalism, Supranationalism – Basic democratic principles”, setting out the classical principles that govern these ideological positions. He also wrote an outline critical account of the development of the EU in “Basic Critical Facts on the EU” for the general use of EU-critics in Ireland and internationally.  These may be accessed, together with this document, under the Tab “Coughlan Articles” on the Greaves archive website mentioned.

In 2022 he wrote to some eighty Brexiteer MPs in the British House of Commons setting out various points relevant to Irish interests and the Northern Ireland Protocol that was attached to the UK Withdrawal Agreement from the EU. He expressed the view that as Brexit was almost certainly irreversible and as it could never be in Britain’s – or England’s – security interest to have a united Ireland inside a Franco-German-dominated EU Federation, those who advocated that Ireland remain an EU Member were in effect advocating the indefinite continuance of Partition. British goodwill is clearly necessary for Partition to be undone. He pointed out that, by corollary, those who wanted a united Ireland should logically and politically support the call for an “Irexit” to follow Brexit. This would at once be a conciliatory gesture to the “Britishness” of Northern Ireland Unionists, who had mostly voted for Brexit in the 2016 UK referendum, while enabling the Irish people re-establish their lost national democracy and independence. It seems that Coughlan was the first person to use the word “Irexit” – a new word in the English language – in various documents that he published following the Brexit referendum.

THE UKRAINE WAR AND DEFENDING THE TRIPLE LOCK

In 2014 Coughlan and his colleagues in the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre criticised American and EU support for the Maidan coup in Ukraine that overthrew the legitimate pro-Russian Government there and installed the right-wing Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who implemented discriminatory policies against Ukraine’s one-third Russian speakers and launched military action against its Russian-speaking eastern provinces. Although Coughlan had never visited Russia or the USSR, and knew no Russians, he advocated a sympathetic public understanding of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine in 2022 to prevent that country joining NATO and to protect its Russian-speaking citizens. Over the following three years he and his colleagues criticised the European Union’s alignment with NATO’s proxy war with Russia at the Ukrainian people’s expense, and the political and moral collapse of Ireland’s governing elite in supporting US/EU sanctions against Russia.  These events encouraged EU militarisation in support of NATO and the EU and marked the abandonment of any meaningful neutrality policy by Ireland. 

In 2024 the then Coalition Government of Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and the Green Party announced that it intended to abolish the “Triple Lock”, which required a UN mandate for Irish troops going on military missions abroad, as well as approval by the Irish Government and Parliament. They were motivated by the desire to be able to participate in EU-sponsored and NATO-related military missions that did not have a UN mandate. As already mentioned, the Triple Lock had been introduced in 2002 to persuade voters who were concerned about the effect of EU militarization on Irish neutrality to change their votes between the first and second Nice Treaty referendums.  It had been embodied in Ireland’s National Declaration issued at that time and registered with the UN along with the Nice Treaty.  This Triple Lock guarantee was repeated in 2009 to persuade people to reverse the Lisbon One referendum result and enable the EU Constitution to be ratified in Lisbon Two. The reason given in 2024 by Irish Government spokesmen for proposing the abandonment of the Triple Lock was that the conditional veto that Ireland gave to the permanent members of the UN Security Council regarding foreign military missions meant that Russia and China could restrain Ireland from exercising its “sovereignty”. The USA, Britain and France had of course been given such a veto as well. This argument, if argument it can be called, came from politicians who had been enthusiastically surrendering Irish sovereignty in large tranches of lawmaking, executive and judicial powers to the European Union for decades.  

In the November 2024 Irish General Election Coughlan urged the opposition political parties and the country’s various peace and neutrality groups to make the retention of the Triple Lock an issue in that campaign, but without success. Sinn Fein, then the largest opposition party, was hoping that it might be able to form a coalition with Fianna Fail following the general election and it did not want to emphasise a policy difference that might inhibit that. In March 2025 when Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin met newly elected President Donald Trump in the White House for St Patrick’s Day, Coughlan sent an open letter to the US President, Vice-President and Secretary of State on behalf of his EU Research and Information Centre explaining why there was consternation in official Irish and EU circles at US peace proposals for Ukraine which recognised Russia’s legitimate interests in that country. This letter, copies of which were widely disseminated, pointed out that the Government’s desire to remove the Triple Lock was aimed at enabling Ireland to take part in EU and NATO military operations directed against Russia. It stated that a federal EU, a “United States of Europe”, was not in the national interest of the USA, and that it would be much more in America’s interest to deal with a Europe of independent sovereign Nation States.  In 2025 Coughlan made a submission on behalf of the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre to the Dáil Committee on Defence and National Security setting out reasons for retaining the Triple Lock. He also made a submission to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Finance and Public Expenditure criticising the EU’s ReArm Europe Plan that aimed to spend €800 billion over a ten-year period on EU militarization and the EU’s SAFE regulation (Security Action for Europe), that established an €150 billion fund for EU armaments between 2025 and 2030. These submissions pointed out the folly of the Government and media of a supposedly neutral country encouraging Russophobia and the push towards massive EU military spending that was then developing in reaction to the early Trump Administration’s seeking to end the Ukraine war and establish a genuine détente with Russia.   

PERSONAL LIFE

As regards his personal life, in January 1984 Anthony Coughlan married the artist Muriel Saidlear, whom he had met in the Wolfe Tone Society.  Her father, Annraoi Saidléar, who was born in Buttevant, Co. Cork, was a teacher, playwright and Irish language activist who had participated in the War of Independence in the Gorey, Co Wexford, area.  Her mother, Mary Ann Travers, was a native of Gorey.  Desmond Greaves noted their wedding in the Irish Democrat under the headline, “Dublin activists wed.” It was a fair summation.  They had no children.  Having previously worked with the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation in Rome, Muriel Saidlear worked as secretary of the Trinity College History Department for some twenty years before her retirement in 1999. This was the same year that Coughlan also retired from TCD, taking advantage of an early retirement scheme that operated there at the time.  Muriel Saidlear has been an activist in the Irish peace movement in such bodies as Trade Union CND and the Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA).

He has a sister, Ann, two years younger than himself, who became a teacher and who joined the Presentation Order in Cork as Sister Regina, where she specialised in

teaching deaf children.  She moved to Pakistan in 1982, where she has worked over subsequent decades as a teacher and health worker with the Kutchi Kohli Christian and Hindu people in Tando Adam and Tando Allahyar in the southern Pakistan province of Sindh.

Bibliography

– Roy H.W. Johnston, A Century of Endeavour, Lilliput Press Dublin, 2003; for the 

  Wolfe Tone Society and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. 

  See also the website www.desmondgreavesarchive.com in the section 

  “Articles/Pamphlets” and the sub-section, “Northern Ireland Civil Rights”, as well as 

   the two-million-word Greaves Journal and the full file of the “Irish Democrat” 

   monthly, for the work of the Connolly Association during this period.  

– Raymond Crotty, A Radical’s Response, Poolbeg Press, Dublin 1988; for an 

  autobiographical account of the Crotty case.

– Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, The Supreme Court, for its chapter on the Crotty case.

– Bob Quinn, Maverick, A Dissident View of Broadcasting Today, Mount Eagle 

  Press, 2001; for the background to RTE’s involvement with the Coughlan case on 

  broadcasting.

– Anthony Coughlan, C. Desmond Greaves, 1913-1988, An Obituary Essay, Irish 

  Labour History Society, 1991.

 – Frank Keoghan, Ruan O’Donnell and Michael Quinn, editors, A Festschrift for

   Anthony Coughlan: Essays on Sovereignty and Democracy, Iontas Press, 2018.

Selected items by Anthony Coughlan 

In Defence of the Nation State:Nation, Nationalism, Internationalism, Supranationalism  

     – basic democratic principles, 2022 ; see www.desmondgreavesarchive.com under 

        the Tab “Coughlan Articles” for this and the following two articles. 

Hollowing Out Irish Independence: How the Irish people were made citizens of an  

        EU Federation, 2021, idem.

Basic Critical facts on the EU, 2025, idem (from later 2025)

C. Desmond Greaves, A Political Evaluation, lecture at the 25^th Desmond Greaves

     Weekend Summer School, 2013; for this text see  www.desmondgreavesarchive.com

‘Ireland, the euro and the economic crisis’, The Citizen magazine, Ireland Institute, 

         2010.

 ‘Lisbon’s constitutional revolution by stealth’, The European Journal, London,   

        December 2009. 

What the Treaty of Lisbon Does, National Platform EU Research and Information 

         Centre document, 2009. 

  Řekneme své ANO nebo NE Europské ústavě, ISBN 80-86547-42-6, Centrum pro 

          ekonomiku a politiku, Prague, 2005

  Amsterdam: the outline Constitution of the new EU State, National Platform 

         pamphlet, 1998. 

   ‘The economics and politics of Raymond Crotty’, in Daltún Ó Ceallaigh, editor, New

          Perspectives on Ireland, Leirmheas Publications, Dublin, 1998.

   ‘Ireland’s Marxist Historians’ in Ciaran Brady, editor, Interpreting Irish History: The

         Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1994 (The text of this may be downloaded 

         from www.desmondgreavesarchive.com )

 C. Desmond Greaves, An Obituary Essay, Irish Labour History Society pamphlet,  

         1991 (This is also available from the website mentioned.)

   Fooled Again? The Anglo-Irish Agreement and After, Mercier Press, Cork, 1986.  

   EEC Political Union: menace to Irish neutrality and independence, Irish 

           Sovereignty Movement pamphlet, 1985.  

The EEC: Ireland and the making of a superpower, Irish Sovereignty Movement

           pamphlet, 1979.

  The Common Market, Why Ireland should not join, Common Market Study Group 

             pamphlet, 1972.

   Ireland and the Common Market: the alternatives to membership, Common Market 

             Study Group pamphlet, 1972.

   The Northern Crisis, Which Way Forward?, pamphlet, Solidarity Publications, 

              1969.   

   The Case against the Common Market, Wolfe Tone Society pamphlet, 1967.

                                        —————–

Anthony Coughlan contributed articles and news items every month to the Connolly Association’s monthly newspaper, The Irish Democrat, between late 1961 and the early 2000s, when that paper ceased regular publication. He also contributed regular articles to the Irish current affair monthly magazine, Village, between 2015 and 2017.

Appendix 1: Note on the Supreme Court’s 1987 Crotty judgement and the legal challenge to the Single European Act 

In the injunction stage of the Crotty case in December 1986 Raymond Crotty’s counsel were significantly assisted by a friend of Anthony Coughlan’s, architect Brendan O’Connor, who researched much of the relevant case-law that was put before Barrington J., and in particular the San Michele case of the ECJ, 1965. This was a useful precedent relating to the deposit of the instrument of ratification of the SEA treaty, which was a key issue in the case. Brendan O’Connor was especially interested in the issue of EU encroachment on fundamental rights in the Irish Constitution through the SEA. For the San Michele case see:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A61965CO0009

In the Supreme Court judgement in the Crotty case in 1987 the majority of the five-member Court found that Part 3 of the Single European Act (SEA) Treaty dealing with foreign policy, which required EC Member States to take part in what the treaty called “European Political Cooperation”, was unconstitutional in that it entailed a surrender of national sovereignty to a quasi-institutional entity, and thus required a referendum of the Irish people before the SEA could be ratified. 

In most peoples’ eyes this Part 3 was a relatively marginal part of the SEA, most of whose provisions, as set out in Parts 1 and 2 of the Treaty, were concerned with establishing the European Single Market, extending the areas in which European Community law could override national law for that purpose, and introducing qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers for such areas.  Raymond Crotty’s concerns regarding the treaty were primarily with these issues and the bulk of the pleadings of his lawyers dealt with them. 

The Supreme Court decision on the SEA was split into two parts. The first part dealt with the constitutionality of the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1986, which permitted the State to ratify the first two Parts of the Single European Act. This had been put through the Oireachtas before Crotty launched his injunction action, and the Irish President at the time, Patrick Hillery, had signed the Bill into law during the course of the action, that being the final step in the Irish legislative process. This indicated that the President had no doubt as to the constitutionality of the proposed Act, for he would otherwise have been constitutionally obliged to refer it himself to the Supreme Court for judgement on its constitutionality. 

The Irish Constitution requires that the Supreme Court hands down a unitary judgement when adjudicating on the constitutionality of an Act of the Oireachtas, without any indication of possible differences of view among its members; and this judgement was given against Crotty in the SEA case, and read out by Chief Justice T.A. Finlay on behalf of all five members of the Court.

The second part of the judgement dealt with Part 3 of the SEA. This related to Ireland’s obligations in foreign policy, and as this did not challenge the constitutionality of legislation each judge was free to hand down a separate judgement. On this three of the five judges found in favour of Crotty and two were against him. This majority verdict regarding Part 3 of the SEA meant that the SEA Treaty as a

whole could not be ratified unless the people voted to do that in a constitutional referendum. 

The reason for this curious and unexpected judgement and for the Court’s approval of what by any objective standard were the radically new provisions of the SEA in Parts 1 and 2, and its decision to require a referendum on the relatively marginal area of possible foreign policy development in Part 3, was Mr Justice Seamus Henchy. Henchy J. was the swing judge in the Crotty case.

If the Court had found Parts 1 and 2 of the SEA to be unconstitutional, it would have been an implicit slap in the face to the then Irish President, Patrick Hillery, who had signed the European Communities (Amendment) Bill into law during the course of Crotty’s injunction application, thereby indicating that as President of Ireland he had no doubts regarding its constitutionality.

Presumably all five Supreme Court judges were aware of this consideration, but it particularly  influenced Henchy J. who, according to Aidan Browne SC, one of Crotty’s lawyers who knew Henchy well, was a personal friend of President Hillery’s but who also wished to find in favour of Crotty’s contention that the SEA could only be ratified if it had popular approval in a referendum. The solution to this dilemma was not to challenge implicitly what President Hillery had done when he signed Parts 1 and 2 of the SEA into law, but to decide instead that Part 3 of the SEA was unconstitutional and that therefore the SEA as a whole could only be ratified if it were approved by the people in a referendum.  

There has been much criticism of the Supreme Court judgement in the Crotty case by Irish advocates of EU supranationalism over the years. They contend that the judgement of unconstitutionality was based on rather flimsy grounds. This note explains how it came about.

Appendix 2:  RTE’s Late Late Show “Trial” of the Pros and Cons of joining the EEC – an incident from the 1972 EEC Accession Treaty referendum campaign. 

Coming up to Ireland’s constitutional referendum to permit the ratification of the Treaty of Accession to the European Economic Community on 10 May 1972, Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTE,  decided to have a three-hour television “trial” of the pros and cons of EEC membership to contribute to public awareness of the issue. The RTE authorities called it a “Late Late Special” and it was substituted for the normal weekly  “Late Late Show”, the popular TV programme that used be compered by Gay Byrne each Saturday night at the time, and which continued for many years afterwards.

Enquiries made by the undesigned some years ago established that RTE failed to keep any record of this important TV programme. Hence the basic facts of this episode are set down here, for I have seen reference to it nowhere else. There has indeed been no decent account of any of Ireland’s  EC/EU-related referendums at the time of writing, not to mind reference to this particular episode.  The relevant Irish historians, pundits and academics, being  mostly uncritical propagandists for EC/EU supranationalism, have to date shown no interest in recording the objective facts about these occasions. 

This account of this TV episode is based on my own memory of it, fleshed out by RTE’s own schedule for the timing of the three-hour programme, which the late Mrs Helga MacLiam, a participant in it, kept a copy of and which her husband Cathal MacLiam came upon recently and gave to me.  I in turn have passed this copy of RTE’s time-schedule for the programme to veteran RTE presenter Dr John Bowman, whom I know slightly, asking him to pass it to whomever in RTE  may be responsible for their records, in case anyone there may be interested in having it. 

RTE approached Micheál O Loingsigh (1932-2016) and Anthony Coughlan of the Common Market Defence Campaign for the No side, and the late Michael Sweetman (1935-1972)  of the Irish Council of the European Movement for the Yes side, to help organise an envisaged “Trial of the Case Of Europe” as a substitute for the much-watched weekly “Late Late Show” on Saturday 11 March 1972. The producer of this “Late Late Special” was Gay Byrne and its Director was Adrian Cronin.

Each side in the referendum debate was allocated a Senior Counsel and Junior Counsel some weeks in advance to help them prepare their respective cases. The  barristers seems to have given their services to RTE on a “pro bono” basis; the publicity would in any case do them no harm in their careers.  The  No-side was allocated Donal Barrington as Senior Counsel and Murray McGrath as Junior. The Yes-side was allocated T. A. Finlay as Senior and John Cooke as Junior.   The relevant Senior Counsel discussed the main arguments to be put  by the five “witnesses” for each side in  the weeks coming up to the programme with Messrs Coughlan and Sweetman respectively, who in turn decided on and briefed their respective witnesses. Donal Barrington came to A. Coughlan’s Trinity College office, then at 184 Pearse Street, to be briefed on the No-side case.  

On Saturday 11 March, two months before the referendum, the presenter Gay Byrne (1934-2019) announced that his usual “Late Late  Show” was being replaced by “The Case of Europe, a programme about Ireland and the EEC”, an issue on which the Irish people would be the ultimate judge/decider in the important upcoming referendum. He then said that he was  passing the conduct of the programme over to Mr Justice Kingsmill Moore (1893-1979), a retired senior judge of Protestant background, who chaired the ensuing television programme as if he were presiding over a Court of Law.

The five witnesses for each side were quizzed first by counsel representing their own side for ten minutes each and then by the opposing counsel for five minutes.  

The case for Europe was presented first, the witnesses for the Yes side in the referendum being, in order of appearance, Paddy O’Keefe (1923-2013), editor of the “Farmers’ Journal”, on agricultural matters; Daniel Murphy, born 1946, leader of the Civil Service Executive Union,  on jobs and employment; Mrs Miriam Hederman O’Brien (1932-2022) on women’s issues; Dr Franz Froschmaier (1930-2013) from the European Commission; and Fine Gael TD Garret FitzGerald (1926-2011), later Taoiseach, on the general political case for joining the EEC. 

The No side then presented its case, its witnesses being, in order of appearance, Anthony Coughlan on the general case for not surrendering Irish sovereignty, followed by Mrs Helga MacLiam (1926-2016) on women’s issues. Helga, being German, spoke on likely rises in prices and the cost of living if Ireland joined the EEC and referred to the Turkish immigrant workers who used hang around railway stations in her native Germany at the time, implying that EEC Membership would lead to similar emigration from Ireland. Labour TD Justin Keating (1930-2009) then followed, who was queried on agricultural matters; then John Carroll, Vice-President of the ITGWU, who spoke on jobs issues and the reasons for trade union opposition to EEC membership, as the Irish Congress of Trade Unions as well as the Irish Labour Party backed the No side in the Accession Treaty referendum;  and then Fr James McDyer (1910-1987) of  the Glencolmcille Co-operative movement, who spoke on Irish sovereignty as well as rural affairs.  

The programme was interrupted by three short breaks, one for the news and two for commercial advertisements. After the last witness for the No side was called, Donal Barrington was given ten minutes to sum up the case for the Nos and T.A. Finlay had ten minutes for the Yeses, after which, to conclude the near-four-hour programme,  Mr Justice Kingsmill Moore announced that the issue was now over to the Irish people to give their verdict in the upcoming referendum. The programme began at 8 p.m. and concluded at 11.52.

I do not remember the details of the argument at this remove, apart from the points made by Helga MacLiam mentioned above. The TV “trial” was doubtless referred to in the newspapers of the time, and it is a pity that RTE does not seem to have kept a record of such a unique programme, for it was certainly a significant moment in an important constitutional referendum. This form of  TV “trial” was probably quite a good way of putting the basic positions of each side before interested members of the voting public. 

Fourteen years later Donal Barrington (1928-2018) was the High Court judge who on Christmas Eve 1986 gave Raymond Crotty (1925-1994) his injunction against the deposit of the instrument of ratification of the Single European Act in Rome, which in turn led to the constitutional referendum on that treaty. In time Judge Barrington became a strong supporter of  European supranationalism and was the only Supreme Court judge – out of five altogether –  to reject Anthony Coughlan’s contention  in the 2000 Coughlan case that RTE had acted illegally and unconstitutionally in the way it allocated free broadcasting time in referendums, and specifically in the 1995 Divorce referendum.   

T.A. Finlay (1922-2017) in time became Chief Justice of Ireland and following his retirement he was appointed the first chairman of the statutory Referendum Commission that was set up to give both sides of the argument in the Amsterdam Treaty and Good Friday Agreement referendums in 1998. He did that job fairly and objectively, as he did later in the first Nice Treaty referendum in 2001 – which was indeed why the Bertie Ahern Government then in office took away the Yes/No function from the Commission to help get the Nice Two referendum through in the following year. Since that date all chairmen of Referendum Commissions in Irish constitutional referendums have been High Court judges and so open to Government patronage by being promoted to the Irish Supreme Court or the European Court in a way that retired judges are not. As such they have tended to accommodate the Government side on these occasions, particularly in contentious referendums.

John Cooke (1944-2022) became a leading Senior Counsel who specialised in EU competition cases, and then a  judge of the Irish High Court and the EU Court of First Instance.  Dr Froschmaier became Director of Information for the EU in 1981-1987 and  then Minister of Economics, Technology and Transport in the German state government of Schleswig-Holstein. 

Michael Sweetman, who was Chief Executive of the Irish Council of the European Movement and organised the case for joining the EEC in this “Late Late Special”, was killed in the Staines, London, air crash, some months after the May 1972 referendum, together with several leading Irish businessmen who were going to Brussels for discussions with officials there on Ireland’s EEC accession. 

Anthony Coughlan

June  2025