Lisbon Treaty

Catherine Reilly (Dublin, Metro Éireann): Who really runs 'democratic' countries, government officials or politicians? I have often wondered.

Last week, a long-time Irish politician raised that very question, in response to news reports in Ireland that there may be another referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Hugo Robinson (Open Europe): The Irish people have voted down the EU's Lisbon Treaty. The EU's rules are clear - if any one member state rejects an EU Treaty, the Treaty falls. It seems pretty simple - Lisbon should be dead.

Yet yesterday evening, the House of Lords rubber stamped the Treaty. The only explanation for this continuation of the ratification process is that it is a means to isolate and pressurise the Irish, with a view to reversing the referendum decision. Keeping the legislative process in motion reflects a presumption that the Irish will be talked out of their rejection - because otherwise, ratification is pointless.

Surely the only way to truly "respect" the result of the referendum - as EU leaders keep saying they will - is not to have the Treaty at all? The end result of pushing ahead with ratification would be a situation where 26 member states have approved the Treaty, and Ireland has not - making the pressure of isolation far more tangible than is the case now, where eight countries (excluding Ireland) are yet to ratify.

This is a response by David Marquand to John Palmer's article on Ireland's "No" vote on the Lisbon Treaty.

David Marquand (Oxford): The real issue goes far deeper than our blinkered political class and media commentariat seem to realise. The post-cold war world, with a hegemonic US as the only super-power, is dying if not dead. An infintely more complex and more dangerous multi-polar world is coming into existence, with China, India and perhaps a revitalised Russia as super powers alongside the US. The US will for the foreseeable future remain the strongest of these super-powers, but it will not be the only one. Economically it has already ceased to be a hegemon: as the dollar falls, the Euro climbs. The crucial question for Europeans is whether we want the world to be run by the Americans, Chinese, Indians and perhaps Russians, or whether Europe should get its act together and become a quasi-super power as well. Europe’s political elites have either funked or fudged that question, and in Britain virtually no one has so far faced it. But the answer Europeans give to it will determine the shape of global and European politics as the 21^st century proceeds. If Europe wants to hold its own in the multipolar world now taking shape it has to make a qualitative leap towards federalism.

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit):The Irish "no" vote has not only exposed the degree to which the leaders of the European Union are prepared to consider going ahead with the Lisbon Treaty in defiance of their own rules and, let it be said, most likely popular opinion across the 27 member states. It has also revealed the hypocrisies of the non-debate in this country.

On the one hand, we have the opponents of European integration who continuously beat the drum about the "faceless bureaucrats" in Brussels who rule our lives, who are stealing our national identity, who . . . - well, you can fill this space with any complaints you like from immigration to high fuel prices to nasty smells creeping across the Channel. The fact is that it is the governments and political class in each of the states who rule the Union, and its democratic de-legitimatisation is their failure.

Catherine Reilly continues her coverage of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. You can read the rest of the series here, here,here, here, here, here, here and here.

Catherine Reilly (Dublin, Metro Éireann): Let me preface this post by saying that I am notorious for my predictions – a sad fact that I neglected to mention in my previous entry. From high-profile murder trials to important and not-so-important football matches, I make the wrong call time and time again (though I did correctly predict a fall in Ireland’s house prices some time ago – golden star for me, misery for thousands of homeowners).

Anyway, to labour the point, I’m not a betting woman, unlike our former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.

Now it looks like I’ve completely called it wrong again when I predicted in yesterday’s entry that Ireland’s undecided voters would vote Yes. It seems that being told what to do, in relation to something you don’t understand, just hasn’t washed with Ireland’s voting public (or the half that bothered to vote). This became clear last night at the voting booths, which saw a late surge in my locality, and was further apparent during Mark Mardell’s unintentionally amusing report from Dublin during last night’s BBC One news. He said one woman told him that she had still not made up her mind as she stood at the voting booth, her pencil ‘hovering over the ballot paper’. Another person told Mardell they ‘hadn’t got a clue’ what the treaty was all about. Fair play to Mardell, he caught the mood superbly during his unintentionally hilarious report.

Catherine Reilly continues her coverage of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. You can read the rest of the series here,here, here, here, here, here and here.

Catherine Reilly (Dublin, Metro Éireann):Tonight, before 10pm, I’ll venture out to my old primary school to cast my vote in the Lisbon Treaty referendum. On the outside, the school looks quite similar to when I departed its gates in the early 1990s. Inside, though, the infrastructure has improved considerably. I sometimes wonder what old photos of us kids in the mid-80s - with our scruffy hairstyles and somewhat tattered appearances - must seem like to the kids at that north county Dublin school today. Unrecognisable, I’d say. Indeed, by the time I left the school system itself in 1999 - when whiteboards with fancy markers were beginning to replace their chalk-choked predecessors -the past was quickly becoming unrecognisable to me, too. ‘You’re so lucky,’ I vividly recall our Irish language teacher telling us as 17-year-olds. ‘You will grow up with the Celtic Tiger.’

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): Today's the big day of course. If you haven't made up your mind already (or you just fancy a laugh) then read Jason O'Mahony's hilarious "Spoofers Guide to how to not vote No on Lisbon" (pdf).

Jason produced a nice pithy summary of the whole treaty debate for us last month. Here he sets out the reasons why you should "not vote no" and has a pretty good stab at explaining what it is the treaty actually does. Well worth a look.

Catherine Reilly continues her coverage of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. You can read the rest of the series here, here, here, here, here and here.

Catherine Reilly (Dublin, Metro Éireann): For Brian Cowen, Ireland’s new prime minister (Taoiseach), the Lisbon Treaty is probably starting to seem much less like a referendum, and more like a chilling midnight horror movie in which you are the first victim. Young buck has world at his feet; has some vague notion of impending doom, though can’t quite put his finger on why; cut to happy suburban scenes, with birds chirping merrily in the background, and then BHAM!

What happened next? No one knows yet - the moviemakers are keeping it a closely guarded secret, and rest assured, there are no ‘spoilers’ on the internet chat-rooms.

Today I asked my mother which way she’d vote in the Lisbon Treaty - had she made up her mind? She’s an intelligent woman, and reads the newspapers (any at all, bar The Irish Times) every evening after a hard day’s nursing at a Dublin hospital. Last night, she watched RTÉ’s Question and Answers (almost identical in format to BBC’s Question Time), which was dedicated in full to the Lisbon Treaty. She was impressed by Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald MEP, a No advocate, but as the conversation pingponged between McDonald, the audience, the presenter, and the Yes side (the latter represented by Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin TD, and Enda Kenny TD, leader of Fine Gael), confusion set in. A confusion of the ‘He said that you said - no I never said that’ variety. A sentence that’s even confusing in itself. Apt.

Catherine Reilly continues her coverage of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. You can read the rest of the series here, here, here and here.

Catherine Reilly (Dublin, Metro Eireann): On Tuesday, a Danish foreign affairs journalist in Dublin asked me for my ‘call’ on the Lisbon Treaty: which way would it go? There’s no need for the drum roll: I responded that it would be passed, with the caveat that if it had been put to the increasingly disgruntled Irish public a year or two later, it could well be a completely different story. I’m no Nostradamus though, and no commentator either, so this departure from fence-sitting has made for a few nights’ uncomfortable sleep.

My personal feeling is that anti-Lisbon sentiments are gathering pace, but whether or not this is enough to impact upon the relatively slim lead of the Yes side, and turn the over 25 per cent of undecided voters towards a No vote, I’m not sure - and anyone who says otherwise is hedging their bets.

As to the anti-Lisbon arguments, one major issue is emerging: credibility, credibility, credibility. The No camp are evoking dark scenarios of European interference with Ireland’s corporation tax, of the legalisation of abortion and loss of power at the EU table. The latter point seems to ring true, though the first two arguments are significantly less provable. And that’s the problem: no-one really knows who to believe because the text of the Lisbon Treaty can be read in so many different ways. It is all a matter of interpretation.

Catherine Reilly continues her coverage of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. You can read the rest of the series here, here and here. 

Catherine Reilly ((Dublin, Metro Eireann ): Is nationalism playing a big part in Ireland’s Lisbon Treaty battle? This was the question posed by BBC Europe editor Mark Mardell in his Euroblog entry on the 19th of May. The short answer is no. The long answer is nope.

However, Mardell picked up on two important issues which could possibly veer some undecided voters towards a No vote. One is the fact that, under the Lisbon Treaty, Ireland would only have a permanent commissioner on a rotating basis. The other is the feeling (communicated to Mardell by a Dublin taxi driver) that the country’s prosperity, funded partly from EU coffers, has been a double-edged sword of samurai proportions.

The latter point is interesting to dwell on. According to the website of the European Commission Representation in Ireland: “While most Irish people will have sped past the blue signs along smooth new roads up and down the country, indicating that ‘This project was co-financed by the EU’, fewer people will be aware of the extent of change that the EU has helped initiate in Ireland. Since joining in 1973, the difference between what Ireland paid in and what the EU paid out is about €55 billion euros.”

Jason O'Mahony: Apparently, if you’re against the Lisbon Treaty, you are either an unthinking eurosceptic, a laughing stock amongst continental constitutional amendment fetishists, or on the verge of being tossed out of the EU and into the North Atlantic. On the other hand, if you’re in favour of the treaty, you are the imperialist lackey of a European Pseudo-Empire, in the pay of Global Capitalist Overlords, or plotting to send your neighbour’s four year old to fight in the invasion of Saudi Arabia. Welcome to the calm and rational debate about the Lisbon treaty.

I will be voting yes, despite the moronic antics of some on the yes side to get me to vote yes. Admittedly, many of the reasons advanced to vote yes are just plain dumb. Firstly, It’s a pretty mediocre treaty that does little to give Europe a real democratic structure, but it is marginally better than what we have now. It’s not vital to the future of Europe either, because we have the Nice treaty which is a perfectly good way of running the EU, and I know this because Bertie Ahern, Brian Cowan, Dick Roche and Enda Kenny said so.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): The Guardian's veteran political correspondent Michael White cultivates a knowing, seen it all, it won't change, nor-should-it-if-it-comes-to-that, attitude that is only bearable because he works fairly hard. Finally, after thirty years, his faith in the system may have been rocked. In today's political briefing he reports that Parliament's Lisbon debate "rings hollow",