Vicent Partal in Dublin: Talk on Catalan independence
The talk that Vicent Partal gave last Tuesday (February 25th) in the Teacher’s Club in Dublin was a resounding success with larger turnout than expected. The event was organised by both the Irish branch of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and the Catalan Council of Ireland.
Vicent started the talk by covering the chain of events that, over the last 9 years, have led to the current situation in Catalonia whereby a large majority is in favour of self-determination followed by the announcement by the Catalan government of a referendum on the matter on November 9th 2014.
He explained how the starting point of the current wave of support for the secessionist movement dates back to 2005 when a new autonomy charter was drafted by the Catalan Parliament with the backing of all but 15 MPs out of a total of 135. This new charter was then severely cut back by the Parliament in Madrid, subsequently approved by that Parliament into Spanish law and signed by the King into law. It was then put to referendum in Catalonia and despite the cutbacks it was accepted by a majority of the people in Catalonia. Some of the cutbacks were significant, such as changing article 1 that stated that Catalonia was a nation to read that it was an autonomous region of Spain. Apparently this was not enough. The 15 MPs that had been against the new charter from the outset, all members of the Partido Popular, the right/far right party now in power in Madrid, with the backing of the party as a whole, decided to challenge the new autonomy charter in the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land. This court, consisting of a handful of politically appointed judges decided that the fundamentals of the new charter were unconstitutional. This represented an unprecedented situation in Spain whereby a law approved by two Parliaments, signed by the King and approved by the people in a referendum was overturned by a highly politicised court (it has to be added that some of the judges in that court were serving well beyond their term of service due to a deadlock between the two main Spanish political parties, that had been fighting each other over the appointments of those judges for years).
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