The Lisbon Treaty: Ireland’s awful secret

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Catherine Reilly (Dublin, Metro Eireann): Burying bad news: never really a good idea, is it?

Just ask the former British government spin doctor who infamously called 9/11 a good day to "bury" bad news. She lost her job. Or indeed the Irish footballer who, in order to avoid international duty after his girlfriend's apparent miscarriage, ‘killed off' not one but two grandmothers when the media smelled a rat. Those terrace chants and nightclub wind-ups will follow him for life.

Burying bad news, we'll not be having that.

But now the dull spectre of faceless Eurocrats burying bad news has darkened the green fields and concrete playgrounds of Ireland.

It follows thus: two weeks ago, an email leaked to the Daily Mail in London, and originating from the British Foreign Office, suggested that European Commission officials had told Irish politicians that the commission was willing to tone down or delay messages that could be unhelpful during Ireland's Lisbon Treaty referendum campaign. The email, apparently written by a British diplomat in Dublin, also stated that the commission's Vice President Margot Wallström had told Ireland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern TD (Teachta Dála - member of the Irish parliament) it would delay or tone down unhelpful announcements. Wallström has denied the accusations.

Sinn Féin, whose opposition to the Lisbon Treaty is at odds with the broad cross-party support for it, predictably latched onto the controversy as one would a winning bingo card on a dark, rainy night.

There is growing disquiet in Ireland at ongoing revelations that senior figures within the EU Commission and EU Parliament are attempting to suppress information from the Irish electorate in advance of the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty

remarked the party's MEP Mary Lou McDonald in the EU Parliament this week.

Pushing a few more buttons, she said Irish people "deserve the full and unvarnished truth about EU intentions regarding defence and security, budgetary matters or corporation tax."

Ireland's Taoiseach (prime minister) Bertie Ahern TD, who will prematurely vacate his post on the 6th of May following alleged inconsistencies over his personal finances, has already moved to dismiss the ‘burying bad news' allegations, as has his successor-in-waiting, Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) Brian Cowen TD.

What is most remarkable, however, are the messages still buried within the offending email. Published in full (needs subscription) in The Irish Times last week, the email bluntly stated, "so Irish thought treaty was taken for granted" (sic) when referring to official expectations that the Irish electorate will pass the treaty, and that "most people would not have time to study the text [of the treaty] and would go with the politicians they trusted".

Dublin law lecturer Rossa Fanning, in his opinion piece in The Irish Times on the 22nd of April, honed in on the ‘confusion factor' when he wrote that it is "a safe bet" that very few of the electorate will have read the 272-page treaty by the 12th of June. Fanning added that requesting the electorate to vote on something they have not read, and don't understand, is "of dubious value".

So, the population of the only EU nation scheduled to vote on a treaty setting out the future direction and mechanisms of the EU, is more than a little confused.

How did that get so buried?

Catherine Reilly is deputy editor of Metro Eireann, Ireland's multicultural weekly.

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