A farce of a referendum favoured by a farce 'establishment'

[junketman]

The Lisbon Treaty vote in Ireland has become a farce really, it's lost all credibility. If you played the All Ireland football final in September and one team lost, you wouldn't play it again in October. To do so would make a farce of the entire All Ireland competition. To hold the Lisbon Treaty vote again makes a farce of democracy in this country. The plan B of committments to keeping commisioners etc, will that be actually written into the Treaty and if so will it have to be re-ratified again by all 27 states?

The Treaty was rejected by the people, not so much because of it's content but because it the farce it became, the political parties were unable to explain it well, they came across as beggers begging for votes rather selling it as in Ireland's best interests, they signed up to a complex document which they themselves didn't read, rubber-stamped it and then expected to bully their core votes into accepting it. Thankfully the core cote en masse went against the directives of their political parties and other organisations.

If we had a respected elite or establishment in this country, Lisbon probably would have passed. But we have been sold too many dodgy goods from our elites in this country to simply buy another one in the form of Lisbon.

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[FutureTaoiseach]

While accepting that the lack of trust in our elites was a key factor hampering the yes campaign, I still say that the underlying problem was the contents of the Treaty itself. This includes issues ignored by the govt in their unsatisfactory 'assurances' apparently obtained from the other member states (but contingent on Croatia joining the EU), such as the Charter, the erosion of the veto, the new voting-system, and the failure of the elite to tell us the final destination of the European project. We are effectively being asked to get in a car without being told where it is going. That is unacceptable when dealing with matters of national sovereignty, for which hundreds of thousands of Irish people died over hundreds of years.