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.
I had a similar feeling watching a recent debate on Irish television’s flagship current affairs programme, Prime Time, where the aforementioned McDonald and Finance Minister Brian Lenihan TD both impressed - so much so that they completely cancelled each another out. It is a wonder that Irish people are not walking around with cartoon-style dizzy marks circumnavigating their heads.
And that is one of the most disturbing aspect of this treaty business. To most politicians, politics is both a career and a game - a game they must play well in order to sustain a career. So tit-for-tat is classic survival mode, and it’s been all-too frequent in the past few weeks.
It has meant that the debate has not progressed. Instead, it stays at a level where the Irish people have been treated as pawns in a game. Smoke, mirrors, and all that.
How about that for a nightmare?
