The day before Thursday’s vote on the Lisbon Treaty there is a moratorium on reporting to let the electorate consider their position.
So, as I’m a voter, I’m going to have a bit of a consider.
I’ve leaned from Yes to No to Yes again over the course of the campaign. The main way to get me to switch my allegiance was to expose me to an advocate for either side. I have never found myself with my vote so open to having my opinion changed by listening to people putting forward their side.
The only problem was that it was not that I was inspired to believe each side as I heard them. Rather it was that the campaigners for both sides were so objectionable that I was driven to their opponents as soon as they opened their mouth. Or, in the case of Mary Lou McDonald, when their mouth was pursed as though they’d just had a dead snail placed on their tongue.
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More later, if I can manage to gather the energy.
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Later: Well, here I am on the bus at the end of the working day. I’ve spent it asking everyone I met how they were going to vote and why. Happily nobody I asked cited any reason given by either campaign. Rather, they all gave reasonable answers (both yes and no) based on their opinion of real provisions of the treaty. To try to help me sort out what way I might vote, I thought I’d jot down some of the, sometimes contradictory, thoughts I had on this.
Consider them the splintered opinions of an undecided voter.
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The various flavours of No campaign made no coherent argument which might sway me. I don’t intend to consider them any further.
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The Yes campaign was mostly based on the imagined trust and loyalty the electorate would give to each estate- political parties, unions, the ifa, newspapers, the bishops, IBEC. Their problem is that, happily in a democracy, people are not bound to bloc voting by class, creed or affiliation. Locking up the leaders of these institutions just highlighted how weak the ties are binding them to their followers in the first place. The public went one way and the people who presume to represent them went the other. There’s no question that this explains the pique expressed as the public’s indifference to being lectured to became clear.
The lessons of Nice were never learned.
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More frequently than an outside observer might expect I was told by a No voter that their problem with the treaty lay with a dissatisfaction with the shape and direction of the EU as a whole. A yes vote was an acquiescence with institutions which they felt needed recasting, not reforming.
Ireland is often cited as being strongly pro-EU. This hasn’t been the case in the last two weeks of anecdotal polling I’ve done. Suggestions that Ireland owes the EU (as an institution) something, or should vote yes out of gratitude for gifts bestowed in the past misunderstands what the referendum is for. It also misunderstands how a democracy works.
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At last: It was a Yes from me, after much hesitation. And a No from the rest of the country.
2 Comments
More frequently than an outside observer might expect I was told by a No voter that their problem with the treaty lay with a dissatisfaction with the shape and direction of the EU as a whole.
This is my reason to vote ‘no’. I’m feeling particularly sore over what’s going on in Chad, where we’re being made look the world’s biggest fools by the French.
The biggest problem for the Yessirs was that the treaty document is almost impossible to read – that’s suspicious in itself. however, it was still possible to perceive the massive shift towards a federal EU state.