Fine Gael TD Leo Varadkar said today that his party’s campaign for the Lisbon Treaty was in part “cynical and wrong”.
The party’s spokesman on Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mr Varadkar, said he did not think any of the Yes campaigners in the treaty did a very good job and he called on the Government to ask other EU member states to halt the process of ratifying the treaty.
Leo Varadkar said he did not think any of the Yes campaigners did a very good job
"Fine Gael worked very hard but we didn't run a very smart campaign," Mr Varadkar said Newstalk 106's Breakfast Show. "We didn't sell the Treaty. We allowed the No side, who eventually deceived the Irish people, to get ahead of us, months and months ahead.
“They had people working full time on the campaign, bags of money, and they’d done all the market research, and by the time we’d engaged the electorate on this, the issues had become nonsense. Neutrality, abortion, tax — things which were totally extraneous to the treaty,” Mr Varadkar added.
Mr Varadkar said the Fine Gael poster campaigns instead of showing photographs of leading politicians, they should have focused on issues, such as democracy and the question of commissioners.
Asked about the use of Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny’s photograph on posters, Mr Varadkar said “Yes, and I think that was wrong. There were Gay Mitchell ones, and I put some up too and I put my hands up.
“What we did with the poster campaign was cynical and wrong. What we should have done is put up posters with Vote Yes For a Democratic Europe, because the Lisbon Treaty was the democratic revolution for Europe... ironically a lot of people voted No because they wanted democracy... We should have put up posters saying Save Our Commissioner because now we’re going to lose our commissioner.”
