The Wall Street Journal is an expensive purchase most days and given its conservative ethos maybe not the best way to spend precious euros. It is also one of the few newspapers still charging for access to its web page!

Come on Mr Murdoch I know you splashed out the billions to get the second best selling daily newspaper in English (the best seller is the Sun, which his firm News Corp already owns) but surely you can do better, the New York Times and Washington Post are free.

However, this morning a 1,000 word opinion column by Robin Shepherd called Pride of the Irish is accessible through Google News. Shepherd is a senior fellow for Europe at Chatham House, home to the British Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Below I have culled some snippets from the article which is well worth the full read:

“Few things inspire greater terror among senior European Union officials than the word “referendum.” Thursday’s ballot on the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland is, therefore, guaranteed to have nerves a jangling. If the Irish vote “no,” Brussels will be faced with two choices, neither of them pretty. It could accept that a nation of four million people has consigned a treaty for a union of 490 million people to the dustbin of history. Or it could, once more, trash the EU’s democratic credentials by pressuring Ireland to hold another ballot until its people vote the “right” way.”

“Simply dismissing the no camp as a bunch of euroskeptic “scare mongerers” won’t cut it.”

“the threat to Ireland’s neutrality is not quite so far-fetched. The Treaty won’t force the country to join EU military missions, but it does seek to considerably strengthen defense capacities. Europe-wide defense policies are already a reality, and a debate now seems fair for a neutral country whose EU membership implies a shared moral responsibility for all European policies.”

“The no camp is also right that the Lisbon Treaty will reduce Ireland’s voting power. As such, the entire panoply of EU policies is surely worthy of discussion since Ireland’s voice will be weakened.”

“Take the recent proposal from France, which takes the EU presidency in July, to harmonize the corporate tax base. Since France has a history of complaining about “tax dumping” from countries like Ireland, which has a corporate tax rate of just 12.5%, it is hardly scare mongering to have a debate about whether this could be the thin end of the wedge toward harmonizing – read: “raising” – corporate taxes across the union.”

“there is plenty of room for a decent debate. Uniquely, that’s what’s taking place in Ireland – the only country out of 27 whose people will be directly consulted. This brings us to a bigger issue, which forms the subtext to much of the “no” camp’s grumblings but which matters to all of Europe. That issue, of course, is democratic legitimacy.”