Post by earl on Jun 26, 2008 13:12:00 GMT
How to survive No vote fallout
In the chaos following the rejection of the Lisbon treaty, I naturally sought guidance from Preparing for Major Emergencies — a booklet that the Irish government recently delivered to every household.
Flipping past chapters on Floods, Hazardous Chemical Spills, Pandemic Influenza and Animal Diseases, I searched in vain for a section on Mass Embarrassment of Our Politicians in Brussels.
You may think that I am overreacting, but according to page 7 of the booklet “a major emergency is an event which, usually with little or no warning, causes or threatens injury or death, or serious disruption of essential services”.
Structural funding and agricultural grants count as essential services, right?
It’s now clear that the government should have included a No to Lisbon vote in the list of terrors section of the booklet. On page 7, they insist that they are ready to deal with all sorts of catastrophes. So the authorities have a preprepared plan for an unexpected outbreak of cat flu or an exceptionally heavy downpour of rain after a long dry spell. Why, then, was nothing ready for Ireland flashing two fingers at the EU?
Adopting the language of the booklet, how does one deal with the fallout from our No vote? If your area is threatened, there are a number of steps you can take to minimise the risk of damage.
The first is to stay indoors and read the treaty fully, even the boring technical bits. You should not, repeat not, approach any member of the public to canvass them unless you have read the whole treaty.
The second step is to inform Brussels that Irish voters are independent-minded and do not appreciate a lack of democratic accountability.
The third step is to reassure people that they are entitled to vote No if they want and that this will not mean that we will have to vote again and again until we get the answer right. If you follow all of these steps the risk of long-term injury to the EU can be contained.
One aspect of the No campaign that struck me was how effectively it got the message across. Staring at a line of posters out the car window one day, the seven-year-old son of a colleague asked: “Mum, are you voting for the politicians or for the monkeys?”
Most of the No posters had a clear message. Most of the Yes posters consisted of a giant picture of a TD, an MEP or a local councillor with a slogan printed so small that it could not have been used as the bottom line in an optometrist’s chart.
The clear impression was that they were more interested in getting themselves elected than in explaining what voting Yes might ordain.
It also struck me that many of the politicians who proudly admitted that they had never bothered to read the treaty came from a legal background.
As a lawyer you would never permit a client to leave your office without reading the will they had just signed, or allow a deal to be concluded before reading the small print yourself.
Clearly some of our TDs think their duties as politicians carry less responsibility and accountability than that of their former role as lawyers.
For our leaders to ask the public to vote for something that they had not read themselves was a form of political mass suicide and proved an arrogant insult too far for many voters who otherwise might have considered voting Yes.
The response of European leaders to the vote has been almost comical. After spending the campaign assuring the Irish public they were being listened to and had a real say in how Europe was run, those same leaders immediately said they intended to ignore our No vote and ratify the treaty anyway.
It took desperate Irish diplomats almost 24 hours to get the Eurocrats back on message and to persuade them to include some begrudging acknowledgement of the validity of the No vote in their pronouncements. If only President Nicholas Sarkozy had read page 15 of the Irish government’s booklet, which advises that “in the event of internal falling debris” one should “shelter under a sturdy table or desk until the situation has stabilized enough for your safe passage”.
He might have avoided insulting half of the Irish nation by telling them, in effect, that so far as he was concerned their vote counted for nothing.
Anyone who wants to understand why the French government reacted to our vote in the manner in which it did should read the work of the French journalist François de Clossets and in particular his latest book, Le Divorce Français (subtitled The People Against the Elite/The Elite Against the People – Whose Fault Is This?”).
He argues that France is run by an elite who have created zones of privilege for themselves and who are entirely indifferent to making the lives of ordinary people better. Disinformation from this elite creates and maintains a consensus and prevents any grassroots ideas from taking hold in France.
One wonders what de Clossets would make of Irish politicians. They are so taken by the dream of the European voyage that they have forgotten they have to bring the people with them. It has been fascinating to watch them all week as they reel from the shock of discovering that the people neither love nor trust them. To paraphrase de Clossets — whose fault is this? The people’s or the politicians’?
Incidentally, the government booklet was published by the wonderfully titled Office of Emergency Planning, a name that conjures up images of hypochondriac civil servants sitting around a table scaring the life out of each other as they think up possible catastrophes.
If the government puts Lisbon to the vote again, it runs the risk of creating a democratic emergency that even these officials wouldn’t have dreamt up on their worst day.
In the chaos following the rejection of the Lisbon treaty, I naturally sought guidance from Preparing for Major Emergencies — a booklet that the Irish government recently delivered to every household.
Flipping past chapters on Floods, Hazardous Chemical Spills, Pandemic Influenza and Animal Diseases, I searched in vain for a section on Mass Embarrassment of Our Politicians in Brussels.
You may think that I am overreacting, but according to page 7 of the booklet “a major emergency is an event which, usually with little or no warning, causes or threatens injury or death, or serious disruption of essential services”.
Structural funding and agricultural grants count as essential services, right?
It’s now clear that the government should have included a No to Lisbon vote in the list of terrors section of the booklet. On page 7, they insist that they are ready to deal with all sorts of catastrophes. So the authorities have a preprepared plan for an unexpected outbreak of cat flu or an exceptionally heavy downpour of rain after a long dry spell. Why, then, was nothing ready for Ireland flashing two fingers at the EU?
Adopting the language of the booklet, how does one deal with the fallout from our No vote? If your area is threatened, there are a number of steps you can take to minimise the risk of damage.
The first is to stay indoors and read the treaty fully, even the boring technical bits. You should not, repeat not, approach any member of the public to canvass them unless you have read the whole treaty.
The second step is to inform Brussels that Irish voters are independent-minded and do not appreciate a lack of democratic accountability.
The third step is to reassure people that they are entitled to vote No if they want and that this will not mean that we will have to vote again and again until we get the answer right. If you follow all of these steps the risk of long-term injury to the EU can be contained.
One aspect of the No campaign that struck me was how effectively it got the message across. Staring at a line of posters out the car window one day, the seven-year-old son of a colleague asked: “Mum, are you voting for the politicians or for the monkeys?”
Most of the No posters had a clear message. Most of the Yes posters consisted of a giant picture of a TD, an MEP or a local councillor with a slogan printed so small that it could not have been used as the bottom line in an optometrist’s chart.
The clear impression was that they were more interested in getting themselves elected than in explaining what voting Yes might ordain.
It also struck me that many of the politicians who proudly admitted that they had never bothered to read the treaty came from a legal background.
As a lawyer you would never permit a client to leave your office without reading the will they had just signed, or allow a deal to be concluded before reading the small print yourself.
Clearly some of our TDs think their duties as politicians carry less responsibility and accountability than that of their former role as lawyers.
For our leaders to ask the public to vote for something that they had not read themselves was a form of political mass suicide and proved an arrogant insult too far for many voters who otherwise might have considered voting Yes.
The response of European leaders to the vote has been almost comical. After spending the campaign assuring the Irish public they were being listened to and had a real say in how Europe was run, those same leaders immediately said they intended to ignore our No vote and ratify the treaty anyway.
It took desperate Irish diplomats almost 24 hours to get the Eurocrats back on message and to persuade them to include some begrudging acknowledgement of the validity of the No vote in their pronouncements. If only President Nicholas Sarkozy had read page 15 of the Irish government’s booklet, which advises that “in the event of internal falling debris” one should “shelter under a sturdy table or desk until the situation has stabilized enough for your safe passage”.
He might have avoided insulting half of the Irish nation by telling them, in effect, that so far as he was concerned their vote counted for nothing.
Anyone who wants to understand why the French government reacted to our vote in the manner in which it did should read the work of the French journalist François de Clossets and in particular his latest book, Le Divorce Français (subtitled The People Against the Elite/The Elite Against the People – Whose Fault Is This?”).
He argues that France is run by an elite who have created zones of privilege for themselves and who are entirely indifferent to making the lives of ordinary people better. Disinformation from this elite creates and maintains a consensus and prevents any grassroots ideas from taking hold in France.
One wonders what de Clossets would make of Irish politicians. They are so taken by the dream of the European voyage that they have forgotten they have to bring the people with them. It has been fascinating to watch them all week as they reel from the shock of discovering that the people neither love nor trust them. To paraphrase de Clossets — whose fault is this? The people’s or the politicians’?
Incidentally, the government booklet was published by the wonderfully titled Office of Emergency Planning, a name that conjures up images of hypochondriac civil servants sitting around a table scaring the life out of each other as they think up possible catastrophes.
If the government puts Lisbon to the vote again, it runs the risk of creating a democratic emergency that even these officials wouldn’t have dreamt up on their worst day.
