POLITICIANS have demanded the Catholic Church remove a magazine from churches that carries an advertisement claiming the Lisbon Treaty will automatically allow special needs children and ill people to be locked up.The advertisement appears in this month’s edition of Alive! and claims to quote an Article from the Lisbon Treaty to substantiate its claims.
The Cork-based body styling itself "Éire go Brách" says the treaty will "allow the detention of persons for the prevention of spreading infectious diseases, of persons of unsound mind – mental illness, depression, Alzheimer’s, autism, special needs, alcoholics, drug addicts or homeless".
It adds that a new EU legal directive will automatically allow the EU to take possession of people’s children, homes and financial savings as they are considered incapable of managing their own affairs.
The claims were condemned by Irish MEPs and described as scurrilous.
Independent West MEP Marian Harkin accused the organisation of deliberately targeting people in vulnerable situations with misleading information.
"We know this stuff is nonsense but not everyone knows that. For instance, I had a call from a carers’ organisation looking for clarification because carers had been calling them and were very worried about this ad," she said.
Ms Harkin pointed out that Article 6 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is part of the treaty says, "Everyone has the right to liberty and security".
Fine Gael MEP Jim Higgins called on the Catholic Church to ban Alive! from all the church porchesbecause they are facilitating the spread of a message that is totally misleading.
Dublin MEP Gay Mitchell said the Church has to ask itself if it isin fact supporting this kind of message.
Máire Ní Fhaoite, director of the Éire go Brách campaign, ran a similar campaign before the last referendum. The website urging "Keep Ireland Irish", also wrongly claims that the EU will adopt the Chinese policy of restricting families to having one child.
Alive! is published by Dublin-based Dominican priest Fr Brian McKevitt, who campaigned for a No vote to the Nice Treaty and the first Lisbon vote.
The paper says it has a circulation of 359,000, mostly distributed in the churches, although they distributed house to house in the run-up to the Nice referendum.
Cóir, the anti-Lisbon Treaty organisation that styles itself Catholic, was attacked by Dublin Labour MEP Proinsias De Rossa.
"They hate everything the EU stands for: equality, pluralism, tolerance of difference, and respect for all. They hark back to a time when you tipped the forelock to your ‘betters’ and lived behind walls of censorship, protectionism and isolation, or got to hell out of it to England," Mr De Rossa said.
Fellow Labour MEP, Alan Kelly, at the launch of the Europe for Ireland pro-Lisbon group in Brussels, warned that the campaign will be a difficult one.
"The mother of all battles is ahead of us. We have all learned lessons from the past and we are in the middle of a ground war. You cannot negate the nervousness unless you engage on a one to one," he said.
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