First, my apologies if this is already on another thread - I did have a look and couldn't see any that fitted.

Before I start my point properly, a digression. I had, six weeks ago, booked a Ryanair flight back from London arriving in Dublin yesterday evening at 7.30 p.m., leaving enough time for me to get across the city to vote. This didn't happen because I ended up working on a deal which only closed today and I'm just about to go to bed after somethink like 40 hours without sleep. What was astounding today was the number of congratulatory sentiments that other people involving in closing the deal - not just here in the U.K., but in The Netherlands, Iceland, France and Germany- expressed about the Irish referendum result, which they had heard about even before I did. To each one of these people I had to admit to my shame at not going back to Dublin to vote, although whether I should be voting at all is doubtful given the requirement for "ordinary residence".

I've just looked at the Examiner and the Irish Times from today (Saturday) and am astounded at the spin that's being put on the No vote, both by the politicians in Ireland and abroad who support Lisbon and by the Irish journalists. Some of the claims being made include:

- People voted No because they felt that Lisbon should have been dealt with by the Oireachtas rather than by referendum and were annoyed at having to vote on it. Where's the evidence or the logic for that? If you didn't think there should have been a referendum wouldn't it be more logical not to bother to vote or to vote Yes as the Oireachtas did? In addition, there's been no empirical evidence produced to support this claim. It doesn't have legs.

- People voted No because they didn't know what Lisbon was about and it was too complicated for them to understand, sometimes tinged (see Richard Sinnott's article in The Irish Times) with a suggestion that lower income groups aren't uneducated enough to be able to take a view on Lisbon. Again, there's no empirical evidence to support this assertion. The fact that those going to vote Yes were more likely to say to opinion pollsters that they understood Lisbon doesn't mean that they actually did. Also, using the Lisbon as Finance Act analogy, I might not be able to make much sense of the Finance Act, but I know what the effect of tax changes on me will be. At the core of the decision on Lisbon is whether you want to transfer power from Ireland to the EU, whether in the form of transfer of competences or a reduction in small country power in relation to votes in the Council.

I don't need to understand the precipiation cycle to know what rain is. Similarly, with the experience of the past decade, people know that the EU is not just about free money. Looking at the figures for the Yes and No votes in the different constituencies it seems to me that the difference in voting has become even more polarised between the higher-income and the lower-income groups, e.g. the difference between the Yes vote in Dublin South and the Yes vote in South South-West is significantly larger than in Nice I or Nice II. The voting power of those on lower incomes is more valuable than those on higher incomes because they do not have the other resources that those on higher incomes have and societal response matters.

- People voted No because of misrepresentations by those advocating a No vote. Yes, of course some of them did. Equally, people voted Yes because of misrepresentations by those advocating a Yes vote. The statement that Lisbon mentions action to combat climate change in its wording, while factually correct, was completely misleading because the treaties in their existing form give the EU competence in environmental matters and that has already been construed as including action to combat climate change. If I have a cinema pass to watch films at any UGC cinema, saying that I can now go to a particular UGC cinema doesn't do anything more for me. The climate change issue in Lisbon is analogous to that example. Maybe if the Yes side had read the treaty they were advocating they would have been better placed to refute any "misrepresentations" from the No side.

The possibility that people might have voted No because they don't like the undemocratic, unaccountable and large-member-state-dominated EU in its current form and don't want to give it more power doesn't ever get mentioned.

What I am astounded by is why it is not put to the Yes side that if they want Lisbon so much there must be something wrong with Nice, which was so good we voted twice. Yet Nice has only been around for six years and we were told at the time that it was really important and would make the EU ready for enlargement. Now I read in the newspapers that Nice was considered to have done a lot of things rather badly and that Lisbon is needed to improve it. Shouldn't there then be a mea culpa from those who advocated a Yes to Nice in not one, but two, referenda to say that actually Nice was a rather poor treaty?

What I am even more amazed at is that now there has been a referendum and the people have rejected Lisbon, Brian Cowen and the government are going to discuss what to do with the other EU member states. There is nothing to do - Lisbon has been rejected. We stick with the existing treaties post-Nice and if any of the other EU member states don't like that then they can sort things out themselves. The only explanation that should be given by Brian Cowan is that Lisbon was rejected and Ireland will be sticking with Nice until offered something better that it can reconsider.

I don't know who else here has read The Wisdom of Crowds, but I would trust the view of 1,600,000 Irish people over a few hundred or thousand bureaucrats and politicians anyday.