The Amsterdam Treaty referendum campaign ended as it began, eclipsed by the Belfast Agreement. Our fourth call to vote on Ireland in Europe yielded our most grudging, if positive, outcome. It is an open question as to whether the result marks a turning point in our relationship with Europe or whether it is the product of particular circumstances.

The very accurate RTE Prime Time exit poll on referendum day offers some useful insights. Like the campaign, the poll was much richer in detail on the peace deal than it was on the Amsterdam Treaty. Of the 38 per cent who revealed themselves as No voters to the pollsters, the biggest single explanation, offered by 36 per cent of these respondents, was that they did not have enough information. Lack of information appeared to outrank national sovereignty or neutrality as a reason for voting no.

The past decade has produced a core of around 30 per cent of voters who have consistently voted No to further European integration, whatever the established political parties recommended. On this occasion the increment to the No vote probably arose from confusion and ignorance; a don't-know-vote-No strategy which, in fairness, is bound to have had some opposite counterpart on the Yes side. This ignorance is one for which the political authorities and not the public themselves are to blame.

Two major votes on one day was wrong but, if voted on a separate day, the treaty still posed a communications challenge. It amends, revises and reforms existing treaties and, even for the interested, cannot be read on a stand-alone basis without reference to them.

Joining the EEC in 1973 was momentous. In 1987 the Single European Act drove the 1992 single market project. The Maastricht Treaty drove the single currency project. Both were sweetened by enhanced structural or cohesion funds. The Amsterdam Treaty, at once more modest and less radical in its ambitions, produced a debate which, like its contents, was more diffuse.

The double impact of the McKenna and Coughlan judgments had an unsettling effect on the referendum campaigns. The old conventions which had to be abandoned or substantially amended were not replaced by creative party political alternatives. A sluggish Yes campaign relied largely on the Referendum Commission to get the message over. Politically, this was a cop-out.

Meanwhile, the No campaign was invigorated by the scale of its newfound media access. Neither RTE, the IRTC nor the political parties have adjusted easily to these new circumstances.

THE Referendum Commission has attempted to do a good job. Its communications policy and budget were a vast improvement on the resources and pathetic dullness of the information campaign on cabinet confidentiality.

A list of Yes and No arguments each filling equal numbers of pages neutered political content. For example, the commission documentation looked at the effect the treaty could have on the religious ethos of Irish schools and hospitals. Depending on which part of the brochure one read, this prospect variously was deemed possible or meaningless.

Such neutrality, which may be the statutory vocation of the commission, for which I do not blame it, is not conducive to clarifying sensitive issues. Chiefly, this is the job of political parties, from which voters are entitled to get real political leadership.

The very act of publication of any argument by an independent, competent authority confers some legitimacy on the case stated, whatever its objective merits in substance. I have little doubt that the somewhat strained Tweedledum-Tweedledee balance in no small measure added its own weight to voter confusion.

The McKenna judgment also exercised an indirect influence on the campaign. Homemade legal extensions, through a form of do-it-yourself jurisprudence, were used, or abused, to telling effect. The only question before the court in the McKenna judgment was whether under constitutional law the government was empowered to spend public money on influencing voters in a referendum campaign. The judgment did not test whether an international organisation such as the European Union was bound in any way under Irish constitutional law.

This did not prevent Patricia McKenna MEP, Trevor Sargent TD and a Mr Owen Bennett from prevailing on the European Commission to cease direct distribution through print media of, in my opinion, its useful Citizen's Guide to the Amsterdam Treaty.

Perhaps judiciously, in the context of not wishing to become a bogyman or whipping boy of the No campaign, but not judicially, the commission limited itself to distribution of the booklet on request. Regretting this course of action, I requested 75,000 copies of the guide, which were duly distributed and which provoked correspondence from Mr Bennett's solicitor.

Noting his right in a free society to hold his views, I reject that these confer on him any standing, rights or imperatives with regard to my acting in accordance with my views both as a citizen and as a public representative. I was pleased to see that Commissioner Padraig Flynn refused to play political eunuch in the course of the campaign. For a process that started as a quest for equality I deplore this creeping censorship by instalment by the anti-treaty forces.

Both the Danish and Irish results reveal most of all, in spite of their best intentions, that Europe's political leadership and elite have failed to close the gap with the citizen. This was not an issue in the foundation phase of European integration because the prospect of lasting peace and prosperity was so much better than the horrific alternative. The public then was happy to let the leaders get on with it.

For decades, economic functionalism, integrating peoples through integrating their economies, both developed and obscured the political raison d'etre at the heart of the process. A generation on, the stakes are decidedly more political, but for many of the public "Europe" is out of sight, out of mind, and "Brussels", its servant, has taken on the mantle of being its master.

Reconnecting citizens to Europe, for many connecting them for the first time, is essential. Some argue that a federal constitution is the way, at once setting the limits and defining the extent of the European project.

Prematurely pressed, this solution could prove the ultimate revelation of how deep the gap is between the elite and the masses and unmake rather than remake Europe. More modestly, Jacques Delors and others suggest that the European political parties might propose nominees for the position of president of the next European Commission as part of their platform for next year's European Parliament elections.

Popular validation could help legitimise this high office. But European political parties themselves are not well established in the public mind, and are we ready yet electorally for a continental polyglot who speaks English with a funny accent? If such a system emerges, I can think of few better nominees than Peter Sutherland, who carries unique global credentials and media weight.

Change requires debate and explanation. The public must be given adequate and timely reasons why the change being contemplated is worth making.

Pat Cox is an Independent MEP for the Munster constituency