It looks like the NO vote will win today and the EU reform treaty will not be ratified by Ireland.
Scare tactics
My opinion on this is that this has been a success for the politics of the scare tactic and a tremendous success for George Bush’s mouthpiece in Ireland. The EU project has hit a major hurdle, the likelihood of a unified counterbalancing voice that can speak with unity in the face of US aggression around the world is now unlikely to materialise in the near future and Declan J. Ganley will become a major beneficiary of this outcome. Roll on the good times for Ganley.
The irony is that we have Sinn Féin doing George Bush’s dirty work for him. Aided in no small measure by those that peddled untruths about the referendum such as the demonstrably untrue statements about abortion being brought in, etc.
The Irish people were subjected to a sustained barrage of untruths and scare tactics by people with very shady funding (both Libertas and others) and this gave the response that was the desired response - “I don’t understand it, so I’m voting no”, or “I’m afraid of change, so I’m voting no”.
Sure, the reform treaty was complicated. There were elements of it that I would have preferred to see changed. However, we now have the situation where a much-needed unified EU will not exist, or if it does, it will exist with Ireland on the outside.
Where are we now?
So, with rising oil prices, how does this affect the ability of the EU to negotiate, say, with Gazprom?
The next time there is a Darfur or a Kosovo, there will be no EU peacekeeping force sent there, since there will be no unified EU.
The next time the US decide to carry out a unilateral pre-emptive strike in some third-world country they are more than free to talk of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and “old Europe and new Europe” and divide and conquer. Well, using their mouthpiece in Ireland, they have succeeded in maintaining that status quo, facilitated by an Irish electorate that decided against change.
Declan Ganley has asserted today in the news that this was sending a message to the “elite in Brussels”. It also sends a message to the elite in Washington. Job well done Declan.
Ireland’s security
We don’t have energy security. Period. We do not produce oil and we depend on the EU for provision of a lot of our resources.
There is hardly a single road in Ireland that doesn’t have a sign indicating that it was built using EU structural funds. We depend on the EU for the fact that a lot of high-tech multinationals are headquartered here. If we were not in the EU we would not have them here.
They would have to leave immediately.
When Poland were playing a-la-carte with their membership of the EU, they were given a very straight message - “Do you want to be part of the EU or a satellite state of Russia?” They made up their minds pretty damn quick. I would be surprised if the EU didn’t take the same attitude to Ireland now. Brian Cowen has already been summoned to Brussels to explain what has happened.
The interesting thing is that if any politician in the last few weeks articulated this possibility, they would have been accused of using scare tactics.
We are now in the most vulnerable situation we have been in since 1988 and we will have to face the consequences. We have finally blotted our copybook in the EU and we can no longer expect any preferential treatment and indeed, I would suspect we might experience an amount of hostility. Having spoken to some MEPs about what goes on in the EU, they tell me that personal relationships are really, really important when negotiating deals. I wonder how safe these personal relationships are this morning?
I wonder how much of the needs of the Irish farmers will be listened to when the next round of the WTO negotiations take place next year?
How do our neighbours now feel?
There is no doubt that we have embarassed the European Union. We have prevented the establishment of a diplomatic foreign service that would have acted as the focal point for EU-world negotiations and the EU is a weaker place than it might have been. Iran must be cracking up.
If recovery from the economic downturn is slow in the EU, it will be very tempting for Ireland to be made into a scapegoat. If fuel prices continue to climb and if gas from Gazprom is expensive this winter, it will be very tempting to point to the Irish referendum and say that this result has made the EU weak. Whether this will be true or not, I don’t know. However, we have definitely left ourselves vulnerable to criticism from our neighbours.
It seems that the other countries are going to plough ahead and ratify the treaty and then it remains to be seen whether they exclude us from things. If so, then this country might be facing hard times ahead.
The proponents of the NO vote were saying all along that “Oh, the EU will go back to the drawing board”. However, based on what I have been reading all day, this does not seem to be the case. France’s European affairs minister Jean-Pierre Jouyet said the EU could negotiate a ‘legal arrangement’ with Ireland to avert a crisis and also that ‘the most important thing is that the ratification process must continue in the other countries.’ ‘Then we shall see with the Irish what type of legal arrangement could be found’.
How many people would have voted no if they knew that was going to happen?
Whose victory is this?
The only organisation that wins from this is the US army and their lapdogs. Welcome to the new Ireland - satellite state of Europe. Hurrah.
8 users commented in " What this NO vote really means "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackRelax! Just give it two months and we’ll all be voting on Lisbon Mk. 2, and it will be railroaded through like Nice was.
I feel there will be a problem with that. Specifically, while Nice had a very low turnout for the first referendum, there might have been an argument in favour of running a second one - if only 20% of the possible electorate vote no, then what does this mean? However, I feel that a second vote on Lisbon will have problems. Remains to be seen what happens.
In this election, 28.3% of the registered voters voted no. The rest either voted yes or didn’t vote.
I really don’t see them having any other options. The EU won’t bend on it, so it is up to Cowen and his cronies to twist public perception until they can hold a revote and claim a victory for democracy. Any lingering faith I had in the democratic system in Europe died with Nice II.
In this election, 24.7% of the registered voters voted yes. The rest either voted no or didn’t vote.
However, the truth is that we were fed lies and lots of them. For instance, the lie that a NO vote would mean a renogiation of the treaty now seems to be just that - a lie. The lies about the introduction of abortion? The lies about taxation? The lies about being forced into a European military force against our will? How democratic is a vote based on information that was full of misinformation and lies? Where is the democracy there? How many people would have voted differently if they had realised that they were being fed such lies?
I wont argue that the people were fed lies, by both sides. That abortion nonsense was a complete red herring, and it annoyed me no end. There was plenty not to like in the treaty without bogus stuff like that, but that’s how politicians do business; they appeal to the lowest common denominator. On the other side, the claims by the government that the treaty could not be renegotiated, or that there was “no Plan B” were also spurious, and amounted to nothing more than bully tactics.
If the EU stonewalls Ireland, and is unwilling to renegotiate or to provide a reasonable workaround, then they are not the sort of organisation that we should be associated with. You might argue that the economic benefits of outweigh the moral implications but I would rather be out of the Union entirely than give approval to the EU’s moves away from democratic accountability.
Dave B you would seriously prefer to be an isolated island with the same status as, say Georgia, than be a member of the EU? Clearly, you don’t remember 1992 when unemployment reached almost 20%. There wasn’t and isn’t a lot of dignity in poverty.
I would rather live free in poverty than relatively well off at the mercy of unelected bureaucrats. There is no inherent dignity or value in poverty but there is a value in freedom.
I’m not advocating leaving the EU as it stands. I can see first hand the benefits that membership has brought, but if Europe tries to ride roughshod over the Irish people then there is a line we have to draw.
Would you argue that an abused wife should stay with her husband because she is better off financially with him than she was alone?
We entered the EU as a partnership of equals, and the idea of being told to enact laws or be punished is completely counter to that. Brussels should take what lessons there are to be learned from this fiasco and move on. They are correct in arguing that the Union needs reform, but it needs to be real reform, not the cruft that was they are (still!) trying to force on us in the Lisbon Treaty.
Dave B. I don’t know where the analogy of the abused wife comes from. I cannot see how we have been abused by the EU and indeed, I did not see much in the Lisbon Treaty that amounted to Ireland being abused or indeed mistreated. The European court of human rights has made us change laws with regard to homosexuality and equality and that’s about it in 40 years - all changes for the better, in my opinion. It amounts to nothing more than scare tactics to suggest that now we would have our laws changed in any significant way by signing up to the Lisbon Treaty. We would have the same rights to a commissioner that Germany would have, even though we have one-fifteenth of the population. We elect MEPs, so how is that not democratic? Should we now elect our civil servants in Ireland or else it would be undemocratic? None of your points amount to anything other than a scare tactic. The YES argument is much more than an economic argument. It is that a unified EU can be a fair and democratic voice of sanity and reason in the world, but thanks to this NO vote it is hamstrung once again. The next time there is a Kosovo or a Darfur and there is no EU rapid response force, the NO people should sit up and take note.