This is something that I’d been wondering about. What, exactly, was in the Lisbon Treaty that so changed Ireland’s constitutional status quo that it required a referendum? Ruth Barrington wonders in today’s Irish Times:

Although the conventional wisdom holds that a referendum is required to ratify all EU treaties in Ireland, this is not the case. [...]

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The number of voters who say, according to Pat Leahy in the Sunday Business Post, that they were canvassed by the Yes campaign. The news here, perhaps generously left downstory by Leahy so as not to embarass contacts, is that the vaunted GOTV efforts of the main parties failed because the local organisations just didn’t [...]

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Manuel Estimulo on Jim Corr’s secret role in defeating the Lisbon Treaty. His batshit Today FM intervention is explained to us in a voice (and syntax) creepily familiar to those who receive, and have not yet marked as spam, those emails from the 9/11 people:

But wait a minute . . .
Is not entirely beyond the [...]

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Cian at Irish Election picks up the thread. Conor at Dublin Opinion got there Tuesday morning, as did we. Mick Fealty also picks up the story at Slugger.
A little crowdsourcing today - formerly known as asking around - reveals that a lot of inquiries to Eurobarometer received the following, identical, reply…the last one provided [...]

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So while Irish voters are getting called a bunch of ingrates in the European Parliament (not least by Irish MEPs), I’m just wondering, surely the best counterargument to questions about Ireland’s commitment to Europe is that 500 Irish soldiers make up a good chunk of the EU force in Chad, protecting refugees from inside Chad [...]

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Why was there no RTÉ (or pool) exit poll from the referendum? Why hasn’t the Eurobarometer post-referendum poll been released? This thing gets more farcical by the hour.
Since about 10.30 last Friday morning, when it became clear it would be a ‘No’ to the Lisbon Treaty on the early tallies, seemingly everyone in Ireland and [...]

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Remember David McWilliams’ “new elite”, the Pope’s Children? Ireland’s baby boomers, the pig-in-a-Python demographic bulge, the 605,000 Irish born between 1975 and 1983? They - and their younger friends - voted No by a whopping 2 to 1 margin.
McWilliams’ meditation on the 2004 European and local elections in that column was pretty prescient:
On June 11,many [...]

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Who’s to blame for the defeat of the Lisbon Treaty. Without an exit poll from the Irish media - and seriously, WTF? — there can only be guesses. Margot Wallstrom says that a Eurobarometer poll will be commissioned to tell them.
But in the meantime, let me suggest that tomorrow, while everyone in the Irish [...]

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My first take, on the Guardian website: we voted No because of the economy and because of incompetent and disconnected elites.
The Yes side blame-gaming is getting embarassing. They need to stop blaming the No side for winning the argument.

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Not having an open leadership election in October 2006 is probably the chief mistake by Fianna Fail that has led Ireland - and Europe - to the precipice. For one thing, they wouldn’t have spent 18 months defending the indefensible instead of chipping away at Lisbon.
Now look. Staring into the abyss, fuming in paroxysms of [...]

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