EUROPEAN LETTER:THE REFERENDUM campaign exploded into life last week as leaked memos, scuffles outside meetings and protesting farmers briefly transformed the usually technocratic debate on the Lisbon Treaty into some sort of Shakespearean drama played out on the streets of Dublin, writes Jamie Smyth.
The week began with a bombshell delivered with pinpoint accuracy at the gates of Iveagh House - the headquarters of Ireland's diplomatic service - by the notoriously Eurosceptic Daily Mailnewspaper. "The Treaty Con" screamed the front page of Monday's edition, which delivered a scathing report on a leaked memo drawn up by a British diplomat after a briefing by an official at the Department of Foreign Affairs.
The memo provided an unusual peek behind the scenes at how the Government conducts its European policy. In truth, most of the revelations in the memo - that the Government will conduct its campaign based on the overall benefits of the EU to Ireland rather than on the treaty itself and that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, which will take over the EU's rotating presidency in July, is "completely unpredictable" - were already well known to those following the debate on the treaty.
A quick scan of the scores of Government press releases praising the EU's impact on the Irish economy in recent weeks shows the economy is key to its referendum campaign. And it certainly doesn't take a leaked e-mail to demonstrate Sarkozy's tendency towards erratic behaviour and grandstanding. Even before getting the keys to the Élysée Palace, the turbo-charged president called the "New Napoleon" by the media had already enraged France's biggest EU ally, Germany, over his plans to form a Mediterranean Union, beef up EU defence and support Tony Blair as EU president.
But the unusually blunt language in the memo, plus the contention that the Government and the European Commission are conspiring to keep difficult proposals off the EU agenda until after the referendum, could serve to increase public suspicions about the complicated treaty.
European Commission president José Manuel Barroso and his colleague Margot Wallström have both strenuously denied that tricky issues are being "toned down or delayed" to safeguard the ratification process. Yet even the cats commonly found curled up in the pubs in the European quarter in Brussels could probably name a few of the commission's legislative initiatives that have been put on hold until after the summer.
Tax commissioner Laszlo Kovacs was the first person to fall victim to the "ratification blues" when his plan to harmonise the EU corporate tax base was put on hold until the autumn. Ireland's hostility to the plan meant it was just too politically sensitive to propose in the weeks leading up to a referendum on the treaty.
Just before Christmas it was also announced that the draft cross-border health services directive was being taken off the commission agenda due to "timetabling constraints". This stretched credibility to breaking point given that there wasn't a single legislative item on the agenda at a subsequent meeting.
The real reason for deferring the proposal, which would enable citizens to access healthcare services in other EU states if they faced undue delay at home, was that the British feared it could damage the national health service. And with a high-profile vote on the Lisbon Treaty due in the House of Commons in March, the proposal was put on ice pending a major redraft.
Last week the commission was at it again. A major conference in May scheduled to discuss reform of the EU budget was postponed and a consultation on the issue extended by two months, coincidentally until after the Irish vote. The commission cited the huge interest sparked by the issue for the delay while officials privately admitted that discussing reform of the union's Common Agricultural Policy before the treaty referendum was probably not a good way to encourage a Yes vote among Irish farmers.
The big fear in Brussels is that there could be a repeat of the disastrous rejection of the EU constitution in France in 2005, when the commission's controversial draft services directive proved to be an effective rallying call for No campaigners.
With the stakes so high coming up to the June 12th referendum in the Republic, clearly doing nothing to upset the electorate is the guiding mantra among EU bureaucrats and governments.
But as the farmers demonstrating in Dublin on Thursday know only too well, there can be no delay to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in Geneva due to take place in mid-May.
The WTO talks, just like the commission's draft plan on tax harmonisation, may have very little to do with the text of the treaty, but as the temperature rises in the run-up to the Irish vote, the voices of angry farmers could yet swing some undecided voters against the EU project. That is the nature of popular votes in referendums: people tend to focus on the big picture rather than the detail.