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.’
This all seems like eons ago, and yet, many of those scruffy kids in those increasingly worn photos from the 1980s are not yet 30 years old. It’s a reminder of how quickly things have changed, and acts as a quick background note to the current uncertainty concerning Ireland’s future direction. Things were bad, things were great. What next?
Things continue to change. Ireland’s boom has dramatically nosedived, and I believe that fear will be the driver behind this Lisbon vote.
According to figures released this week, Ireland has experienced its largest ever recorded annual jobless increase. The Central Statistics Office has reported that the number of people registering for unemployment assistance has risen by almost 48,000 in the last twelve months. The jobless figures for May bring the total number of registered unemployed to 207,300, the highest level since January 1999. The unemployment rate is now at 5.4 per cent.
Ireland isn’t quite in melt-down just yet, but there is an unmistakable sense of foreboding. And in the bad times, Europe was seen as something that brought Ireland nothing but good. It will have little to do with an understanding of the substance of the treaty when, I predict, Ireland’s undecided voters will vote Yes.
We’ll know tomorrow evening whether I was right.
