Are we wise or not? Sophisticated? Politically astute? Maybe all and maybe none. It’s like this: when Irish voters deliver a verdict in accordance with the wishes of observers and experts, we hear much of their sophistication and intelligence. When their votes go the other way we hear of their cupidity and self-interest.

If you want a piggy perspective, on the whole I think Irish voters have been pretty wise in referenda, just like the Irish judiciary have been pretty wise in deciding cases left to them, often as not, by the cowardice of politicians. (And if you want to talk of cupidity and cunning and self-interest, that’s where you should start.)
Traversing the country these days, you’d know there was a vote in the offing. It’s poster heaven! But what’s it about?
I kid you not, there are posters throughout Roscommon saying, ‘Save Roscommon Hospital: Vote No To Lisbon’. There is no name on these posters, no way of knowing who printed and hung them, nobody with whom you could check what’s up, doc?
Well, I’ve looked at the explanations of the Lisbon Treaty and I can’t see where Roscommon Hospital fits in at all at all.
Nor can I see what most of the other posters have to do with the referendum either. ‘Keep Our Commissioner: Vote No’… Don’t they mean, ‘Let Them Keep Charlie McCreevy’? Do these people have any idea what an EU Commissioner actually does?
There’s lots of vague and useless guff, Vote Yes to keep us at the heart of Europe, Vote No to keep us… at the heart of Europe. It’s a good deal to some, and a bad deal to others. Black is white and white is black.
Where the message is unclear or contradictory, inevitably, one examines the messengers. Immediately, a central question emerges. Why is it that the parties of the centre are all calling for a yes vote and the parties of the fringes or the extremes, left and right and other, are calling for a no vote?
For sure, the opponents of the Treaty make uneasy bedfellows, consisting of various (mutually hostile) strands of Sinn Féin, Trotskyists like the Socialist Workers Party, idiosyncratic independents like Patricia McKenna, Kathy Sinnott and Dana, right wing groupings like Cóir (aka Youth Defence) and Libertas, and a range of conspiracy theorists…
If one went to other European countries the same pattern is observed.
One is always a bit suspicious of organisations that adopt poncey Latin names and Libertas is no exception. According to the Irish Times on May 20, five of the seven members of the Libertas Institute Ltd are employees of the Galway subsidiary of Rivada Networks LLC, a company that provides communications technology to the US military’s northern command as well as to the National Guard in 16 states in the US, and three US federal bureaus.
So how do Sinn Féin feel about making common cause with a group led by people with close links to the US military? Or common cause with Youth Defence for that matter, or with the French hard right politician Jean Marie le Pen?
Both sides have been guilty of faffing and message manipulation. But to be purely objective for a moment, the NO side has resorted to much more fear, red herrings and muddied waters than the Yes, and this makes me very suspicious.
I still haven’t fully decided, but I know which way I am leaning and it is driven more by fear and loathing of the unholy coalition opposing the treaty than by unease about what the thing actually does.
In essence, as I have it, the Treaty amends (or rather tidies up) the EC Treaty and the Maastricht Treaty to bring them up to date with the expansion of the European Union. Various changes follow but, crucially, we don’t lose our veto and any military involvement has to be agreed by the Dáil. Workers are protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The Lisbon Treaty is a huge document and makes hard going for a reluctant reader. But most of what’s in it is not new. It revises and reworks what already exists. The summary documents produced by the Referendum Commission and the National Forum on Europe are good walk-through guides to the basics. They deserve a close read.
Having done that, one way or the other, both Ireland and Europe deserve that we all go and vote.