This column originally appeared in the 8 June 2008 Irish Mail on Sunday (not available online). Bonus material after the jump:

Trust in you? (In the print edition, accompanied by a still from the Jungle Book - certainly a first for an OpEd of mine, not counting extemp ones delivered aloud including, ‘time for bed’)

Richard Delevan
You’re a bunch of “indulgent“, “out of your mind“, “dysfunctional” ingrates who can’t be bothered to “take half an hour” to appreciate the blessings to be bestowed by the Lisbon Treaty. That’s the message being sent to voters by a panicked Yes side and most of the media. It’s your fault, you bog-ignorant solipsistic waste of a vote. You should have just trusted us.
The Yes side is grasping for a narrative to explain its likely defeat. Friday’s disastrous Irish Times poll showed the No side with both an unprecedented lead and the momentum entering the final week of the referendum campaign. Panic and disorder is spreading in a badly-led, poorly-argued, arrogantly-executed Yes campaign.
If Brian Cowen fails to rally enough loyal troops to keep the margin narrow, the defeat will become a rout that will threaten his own hold on power. Being a bully is one thing. Being an ineffectual bully is something even Fianna Fail cannot accept.
And you, dear voters – or at least the 70% of you not eager to vote Yes – are being framed as the scapegoat for their failure.
There may be a good reason why the Yes side has made the debate about “trust us”/”don’t trust them”, instead of making a cogent positive case for the Treaty on the merits: they don’t have a cogent positive case for the Treaty on the merits.
Brian Cowen couldn’t have made the case more explicitly than he did yesterday. “I’m saying to people with all honesty, with my hand on my heart. Believe me”, he begged. And if you’re not convinced, it’s not because you have an honest disagreement; it’s because you prefer the rogues’ gallery of No campaigners.
Perhaps it would be impossible to make a concise case in favour of the Lisbon Treaty. Arguments for theories of quantum gravity more easily condense to 10 words or less. Certainly Mr Justice O’Neill, who heads the Referendum Commission, finds it difficult. On June 4 he explained that Ireland would lose its veto over several areas, including “arrangements for the control of implementing powers”. To the astonishment of journalists present he then conceded he had no idea what that meant.
What this and other gaffes – like the quip from our soon-to-be-lesser-spotted Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, that no “sane person” would want to read the Lisbon Treaty – reveal is that the Yes side hasn’t just done a poor job trying to make the importance of Lisbon comprehensible, but that they haven’t tried much at all. Instead, they made this campaign about who you should trust. After the shock defeat of the Nice Treaty in 2001, “trust us” was a successful strategy in the re-vote. But it turns out that “trust us” was a suicidal strategy in June of 2008.
At least in 2001, government still had a well of trust it could tap. But history will wonder how it was that someone as smart as Brian Cowen and his team could be so blind in 2008. Since 2001, Irish public life has been debased by outrageous levels of spin, lies and distortions from those in power, on everything from the property market to economic growth to the health service to the tribunals to the singular national psychodrama of Bertie Ahern and his money.
It is nothing short of monstrous arrogance that would lead Yes campaigners to expect that people who have been lied to over and over again would once again be relied upon to acquiesce when told, “believe me”.
They said “trust us” about house prices. After years of being sustained by denial, bluster and bullying, the property pyramid scheme kept going by Fianna Fail, lenders, developers, estate agents and much of the media has come undone. Units sold as luxury apartments in Dublin’s Gasworks are now being offered for rent as student accommodation. Negative equity stalks the land at the moment that job losses may really bite. The “soft landing” promised by Cowen isn’t materialising.
On Thursday, as if on cue, the European Central Bank signalled that it would raise interest rates next month – which will translate into higher mortgage payments, adding to stress on households staring at $140 per barrel oil and food prices increasing in real terms for the first time in 60 years. And it will push the housing market off the cliff.
Is it any wonder that the TNS/MRBI poll in Friday’s Irish Times reveals that the age group most leaning “No” is 35-49? The people with the biggest mortgages, the most mouths to feed and increasingly nervous about their jobs?
They said “trust us” about economic growth. Economists privately worry that it’ll be 2010 at the earliest before we can even hope to see our new “normal” growth rate of 3%. Which means you should be suspicious of all those promises of shiny new infrastructure in the National Development Plan, predicated on a growth rate twice that.
They said “trust us” about the propriety of that chief avatar of “trust me” politics, Bertie Ahern. They said it after his tearful confession to Brian Dobson, they said it before the election, and Bertie is still at it in Dublin Castle, spinning unbelievable yarns that deserve each and every derisive, bitter guffaw from the gallery that Judge Mahon tries to quell and the Irish Times scolds as “unpleasant”.
Perhaps those undecided and No voters, now queasy over the hero’s farewell they gave Bertie just a few weeks ago, have decided – watching Bertie’s shameful denouement – that these people have used up their “trust me” credit.
This may also explain why the flip side of the “trust me” non-argument, “don’t trust them”, has been so prominent and will be even more strident in the closing hours.
The ad hominem attacks on the unlikely No coalition – “neocons, Trotskyites and Spuccers” – have been increasingly explicit. Garret Fitzgerald and Eoghan Harris, the Europhile yin and government gadfly yang of Yes columnists, both openly argued last weekend that the best tactic for the Yes side was to demonise the personalities on the No side. Fear of guilt by association would do the rest.
But even this final, desperate line of the “trust us” argument doesn’t look promising.
According to the TNS/MRBI poll in Friday’s Irish Times, just 4% of people intending to vote Yes said they were doing so because of concerns about the personalities on the No side – near the bottom of a long list of unprompted responses when asked why they would vote Yes. Given that the universe of Yes voters has shrunk to 30%, this means that less than 2% of all voters see it as a concern at all.
All of those sneers and smears clearly feel satisfying to Yes campaigners, but they conceded much of the issues terrain to the No side.
Why, given how complex the Lisbon Treaty actually is, did the government set an early date for the referendum and then wait so long to start making its case? Because all of the oxygen in the political universe has been consumed by Bertie Ahern’s agonisingly slow-motion departure from office.
It may not be too late for the Yes side to pull out a squeaker. But it is too late for them to win honestly, by making a real case for Lisbon. If the Treaty’s bottom line is to enhance the EU’s power, presumably to do good, the Yes side should have argued why more power in Brussels is a good thing, and let the voters decide. Because “trust us” was a loser before it began. The more they argue that line in the closing hours, the more certain defeat becomes.
ENDS

I’m far from the only person who noted this intellectual bankruptcy on the Yes side, that the “trust us”/”don’t trust them” frame has been the best they could do.

Hugh Green goes further, reckoning that the Irish Times rejects trust in the people:

A restatement of the idea that the role of the citizen is to trust those whom she elects and believe what she is told. If this is the case, why have elections at all?…. on this evidence it is also true that the Irish Times doesn’t trust the people.

Anybody who remember’s the apoplectic leader from Madame - “A poor reflection of ourselves” - after their October 2006 reporting on Bertie’s finances failed to immediately dislodge him as Taoiseach, and the initial polls showed a post-Dobson tears bump for Bertie: “What sort of people are we? We know now.”

When the Tribunal effects the result the voters did not - by forcing into the light of day the impossibility of Bertie’s cover stories - the Irish Times isn’t happy with that either, an “unseemly rush to oust the Taoiseach”.

So why anybody takes the Irish Times seriously on these matters anymore is beyond me. They believe in nothing so much as their own preening moral superiority and little else beyond that.