Where Mary Lou McDonald gets it wrong on Lisbon.

In an article in the Irish Times, SF’s MEP for Dublin Mary Lou McDonald makes the case that the Lisbon referendum must not be rerun but that the Treaty must be renegotiated. The thing is she then goes on to make the same mistakes of overreach and presumption that the government did when campaigning for the treaty to be approved. What was rejected was the proposal to allow the Oireachtas sign up to Lisbon, not the content of the Treaty per se especially when so many citizens said they didn't understand it. Their response to vote No was in the circumstances quite sensible.

However, renegotiation requires that both parties are interested or able to do it. Mary Lou MacDonald argues that SF wanted the committee to look at “the future direction of the EU itself and how Ireland could shape that future”. I’m not sure how such an undertaking could possibly have reported back in any sort of realistic time frame and perhaps that was SF’s intent.

She states “There were also repeated attempts to scaremonger the public about the implications for the economy following the Irish people's rejection of the treaty. No evidence was presented to the committee to back up their claims.” The idea that the people’s rejection of the treaty has no implications for the economy is nonsense. If Brian Cowen had a bad flu, it would have implications for the economy for good or bad. That somehow our rejection of a EU treaty would have no consequences is complete overstatement of the position. Something she has rightly criticised elements of the Yes side for.

I do wonder at her suggestion about all the members of the public being given the chance to contribute in open session. It is unclear what ideas were not considered by the committee and what would have been the real value of every Tom, Dick and Harry having a chance to rant and rave at politicians on whatever their particular hobby horse, often only tangentially related to the EU is. “Sinn Féin also argued that the subcommittee should proactively engage as broad a section of the public as possible, that it should meet in open session, in and outside of Dublin, and listen to the opinions of ordinary citizens.” A halfway house idea that might have been worthwhile would have been to facilitate more engagement via the web, but the travelling road show idea as evidence by the Forum on Europe is past its best.

In talking about what needs to be addressed Mary Lou McDonald makes further missteps in saying about the report that it “sets out in detail the challenges facing Ireland and the EU and the mechanism for addressing the concerns of the Irish electorate on key issues such as maintaining our political strength, protecting neutrality, workers' rights, public services and taxation. It is clear that these issues can only be addressed in a new treaty which includes legally-binding protocols and not declarations of clarification which are not worth the paper they are written on.” There is nothing to suggest that all of the above must be addressed in order to win the support of the majority of the electorate. In a referendum all the government is required to do is gain the support of 50% plus 1 of the voters on the day. If they had adequately addressed the concerns of any one of the above issues they would probably have tipped the verdict from the vote last summer. The board scope of her argument that “...opinion polls,...demonstrate that people's concerns over neutrality, workers' rights, public services, democracy and Ireland's influence must be addressed in any future EU treaty” is also wholly incorrect.

She finishes by referring to our political goodwill with the EU while leaving aside the fact that much of this goodwill has dissipated in the aftermath of Lisbon. “It is time that the Government stood up for the interests of the Irish people and used the political goodwill which we have built up over many decades.” In essence the campaign strategy of SF and indeed Libertas was one giant blackjack hit, ignoring the possibility that we might be just as easily be bust as to hit 21.

As is her wont, she makes her point well, but doing it well does not in and of itself not make her point correct. Lastly, and of course, it is to be expected of me, given my own political leanings, to be saying this. It is quite poignant for a representative of SF to constantly refer to the democratic will of the people. It was the democratically expressed will of the people which they chose to ignore, election after election for 75 years, when it came to the republican movement’s campaign of violence which was supposedly in the name of the Irish people.

Prime Time turns its lens on Declan Ganley, burns self.

Well, that was one hell of a piece rubbish television especially compared to other investigative programs Prime Time have done in the past. The overall flavour was of the Rowdy Roddy Peeper segment in the Simpsons. Actors in shadows, dark moody music. I was half expecting a black and white clip with a damsel laid out on a train track with some high tempo piano tinkling going on in the background to surface but it didn't.

A couple of weird things did strike me during the course of it though. Katie Hannon told us the wife of the man murdered in Albania told her stuff but wouldn't do it on camera (don't they have the blurry face thing anymore) but we were lead to believe she was fine with Hannon standing outside her house quoting her, not even to voice record her? And we're to take Hannon's word for it that the wife actually said X Y or Z. That's very strange for an investigative program. Usually if you can't get something on the record then it simply isn't used. Whither Woodward and Bernstein.

Ganley also made reference in the program to a phone conversation that Katie had had with the former junior Latvian minister and which the minister (now forester! how exciting) also said that he wouldn't be adding to when she went to visit him but we didn't get to hear any of that phone conversation. Why was that? What was the content of it? Was it any cop? And yet she played a recording of a conversation in the guys office. I take it she recorded that legally, I mean some countries do allow you to record your own conversations, others require the permission of both parties. In some places you can only do it in a public place in others it is ok to enter someone's home or place of work and record without their knowledge. I presume RTe confirmed what the situation is in Latvia and I can only presume that is why couldn't she try to do the same in Albania? Or did they simply make an editorial choice.

Over the course of the show a lot was made of claims by people that claims by Ganley had been overplayed or that people's roles were more than they actually were. So while it was possible that Ganley had overstated his role in Latvia but it wasn't apparently possible that the person in Albania had overstated their role in Anglo-Adriatic or that others were overstating it now. The Albania voucher scheme sounded like all kinds of interesting weirdness but despite this tease we magically didn't get any concrete detail on what happened. We seem to have been told that the state gave out vouchers which were to be linked to priviatised state assets and Anglo Adriatic collected these vouchers but then the state didn't honour them and along the way people started trading in the vouchers. But was Anglo Adriatic involve in that trading? RTe never said, nor were we given to understand why Anglo-Adriatic were even collecting them or were they buying them? The picture presented was as clear as soft-focus image taken by someone with a shakey hand of a murky lake waters, at dusk, in winter, in Lapland.

So the view from the show is that Declan Ganley embellished his role in advising the Latvia government at some point in the early 90s and that some people lost money on some strange voucher scheme in Albania used to privatise, and that his company may have engaged in overreach in contract negotiations with the US CPA in Iraq.

Now I wouldn't personally be inclined to become too involved in business dealings with Mr. Ganley simply because he strikes me as too much of a shrewd operator and Kerryman that I am, we know a hoor that's too cute for us.

Overall, the program gave us nothing you could call concrete or a smoking gun, only rumours and impressions. If this is something that RTe is doing to assist in securing a Yes vote next time (something I would on balance like to see) then God help us all.

As for the talk of the Standards in Public Office. The current SIPO set up doesn't give you any real idea where the money for the major parties comes from as they simply work around it with small donations. People should read some of Elaine Byrne's articles in the IT to see what I'm talking about. There may well be questions from SIPO for Libertas to answer about funding but the question is why would Libertas be expected to provide this information ahead of all other organisations that campaigned for/against the Treaty. One can only presume that Coir and the Alliance for Europe have gotten similar letters at the same time that Libertas did or has Libertas been singled out?

Update: it now appears that Libertas are saying they have not yet received the letter that RTe showed as coming SIPO. Where did RTe get it from?

Lisbon:Lisboa - the aftermath Part 1

It’s likely we're going to be picking over the consequences and causes of the treaty defeat for weeks perhaps even months. I’m going to have a quick start here but no doubt I’ll revisit it in more detail and with better grammar over the coming weeks. I voted YES in the end and not with any great enthusiasm. I suspect that now that while the remaining EU member states will continue with their own ratification processes that the reforms in Lisbon are dead. If the EU tries to press on without us then I think we should look to establish a new relationship with the Union I suspect other members states may in time wish to take this new Irish option.

I believe there are a number of questions to be asked from the outset.

Was the Lisbon Treaty lost from Day One? Or perhaps even before Day One?

Decisions on important matters such as voting for treaties, international agreements or sending out for food seem to happen in a particular order in the minds of most people. We have a need to answer certain questions in our heads before embarking on any process or journey and while we don’t have to commit to any one single answer before proceeding to the next question we do need something to build on.

Why are we doing this is the most basic question of all in my view. In the absence of a why we can’t proceed. Once we’ve a working idea of why we’re doing something we can move on to the more specific, almost mechanistic problems, of what and how are we going to do this, and then finally there are the more mundane matters of where and when are we going to be doing this.

Take getting married - you want to marry someone because you love them (there’s the why) and you have to ask them and convince them it’s a good idea (what and how) and the where and when of the marriage itself you should probably seek to work out together or just go along with their ideas for the sake of a quiet life.

Coming back to Lisbon, the government never explained ‘Why’ of we were inviting this treaty in for tea at all. They skipped that step and my belief is that the core lesson of Nice II was that if people were participating in the process they would support complex compromises involved but if they are presented with them as fait accompli then they will refuse to own them. To my mind, the seeds of the loss were sown even before the Treaty was signed. In the lead up to summit there was no significant advance trailing that. Sure the politically involved knew there was something afoot but the regular joe schmoe in the pub didn’t know about it and when the government came home with the legalistic version of Jack’s Magic Beans the public were suitably unimpressed. “You brought home wha now?”

I think the real seeds of defeat lie in the manner of the negotiation and signing of the treaty itself and these factors subsequently fostered the growth of the No argument more than the Yes side. In essence the Yes side lacked a convincing enough narrative as to why we had the treaty at all, not to mind being able to argue about or explain the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the content the document. In some sense, there wasn't a good enough origin myth to the Lisbon Treaty.

I've used Jack and the beanstalk comparison already but it stands repeating. The government never outlined in advance the WHY before it signed up to Lisbon which thereafter made the WHAT and HOW that much more difficult to convince people of. The vast majority of people don't spent their time wrapped up in political matters, they have jobs to do, children to put to bed, shopping to get, cars to drive and so on. So from the moment the Treaty was signed they were wondering ‘why are we doing this?’ And in the vacuum that existed the No side were able to decide the ground on which the battle would be fought and because it took so long to get going the YES side turned up like a bedraggled and uncoordinated army to be picked off piece by piece by the various No factions.

As for the campaign itself did the Yes side lose it or did the No side win it?

Let's be honest here all the protocols in the world don't convince the voting public when we've got a government addicted to taking a mandate to do X and going off and doing Y instead. They stated quite baldly that we wouldn’t be joining the Battle groups arrangement without a referendum, whether you agree with the decision or not that seems like bad faith. And since the general election we’ve been repeated told that the result really being a referendum on believing Bertie’s account of his financial accounts. I’m 100% certain that option of believing him or not simply wasn’t on the ballot and the general the population are equally certain of that too. People are just plumb tired of voting for one thing and getting another. So all the promises in the world that article such and such will protect concern A or B didn't wash. Working from the premise that this was just another great thing brought to you by the people they couldn’t explain their finances and told you that the economy was just dandy stretched people's credibility.

The wrong tone overall- The fact is the government used tactics that were suitable if the mood music was inclined to dance with the Yes side when in fact they were wary to start with and instead of those concerns being treated as genuine (even if not necessarily always based on fact or reality) they decided to mark everyone inclined toward No as being crazy and hope that the sensible people would be scared off from associating with the No side. There is a thin enough line between persistence and harassment.

The wrong pitch on specific issues - The discussion on the commission was a classic of the type, the argument about why the commission needed to be reduced was taken as read by the body politic, and the win for Ireland and smaller states that all being treated equally wasn't highlighted from the start. Other alternatives proposals such as a permanent commissioner for the large states with rotation for the smaller ones were never teased out in public.

The absence of the personal touch - I wonder to what extent the campaigning on the ground (or the apparent lack of it in many areas) by various party representatives had an impact. And the extent to which all political parties have become dependent on the personal armies of the local representative of the political pyramid to do the footwork. And many reps may have decided there was nothing directly in it for them, and so they didn't have their feet on the gas to the same extent. They were happy to have few posters but they tested the temperature of the water and decided they didn’t want to leave themselves on the losing side. I'm aware of a strong local campaign in a few areas and I can see that swung the vote in what was not fantastically fertile territory. However in other areas there was no local campaign.

Parties do not talk only to their own supporters or just to their own members. If the defeat is 55/45 as seems likely and with a turnout around 50% then I can't see how FF can claim that their supporters voted YES but that it was all down to the fault of others.

I voiced my concerns a good while ago about the mood of the electorate, and the likelihood that many people wanted to give the government a slap. I was sadly proved right in that regard.