Dublin Opinion

There was a lot of noise generated last week about the Lisbon situation when the Irish Times reported Nicolas Sarkozy’s comments during a private meeting with colleagues in his UMP party. The comments, reported by party members to journalists outside the meeting suggested, non, insisted that Ireland would have to have a second referendum.

This was flatly denied by the ‘charming’ and surprisingly open Sarkozy when he arrived here like a rock star on Monday, whenever he wasn’t busy fondling Cowen’s blubber-fist or giving him a big old bear hug, which required a modest leap so that their cheeks made contact.

But despite Sarkozy’s alleged comments about a second referendum supposedly pissing Cowen off at the time, it’s fairly clear that this is the course of action they are going to take. Why else would the government commission such an extensive poll of Irish voters, which is due to take place at the end of July and the beginning of August? The ostensible reason given is that the Government need to know why Ireland voted No, but the only reason they would want to know that, at this level of detail (2000 people are to be polled, there are to be 8 focus groups etc), is to discover what those objections were so that the caveats and appropriate wording can be found to make a new referendum acceptable.

However, the findings of this new poll are inevitably going to be tainted by the amount of comment and interpretation that the No vote has already generated. In many cases there has been a concerted effort to paint the No voter in a certain light using the available survey’s that have been conducted so far. Certainly the reasons given for why Ireland voted no are so unbelievably off the mark and this will probably affect what people have to say when asked how they voted and why.

One factor in the vote that got a lot of prominence but which wasn’t backed up by the findings in the way it was interpreted was that people voted no due to a concern about the influx of new immigrants.

Rather than bang on about that here, however, I’ve written a long article on this over at Irish Left Review. I also posit the real reason why Ireland voted no, and already there are a couple of excellent other reasons given in comments that I didn’t consider.

At this point I’d like to acknowledge Conor’s help in drafting the article.