Holding referendum before summer would put huge strain on political system, writes NOEL WHELAN.
MANY OF those who in recent weeks have been suggesting a pre-summer date for the second Lisbon Treaty referendum are motivated by a desire to restore the reputation of Ireland in the international financial and political communities as soon as possible. They see the prospect of a successful referendum acting as a circuit breaker on the flow of negative stories about Ireland.
In advocating for an early referendum, these voices have however not only had insufficient regard to the catastrophic impact that a second Irish rejection would have among the same international audiences, but they have also drawn too much comfort from the recent opinion polls.
Given the current volatility in Irish politics, opinion polls need to be approached with a lot more caution than usual. Even on the figures in last week’s Irish Times TNS/mrbi poll, a Yes victory in a second Lisbon Treaty referendum is far from guaranteed.
In the first referendum, the result was 53.4 per cent No and 46.6 per cent Yes. The first indications that it might be possible to reverse this result came in a TNS/mrbi poll published last November which, when don’t knows were excluded, showed a slight Yes majority of 52.5 per cent to 47.5 per cent No.
The TNS/mrbi poll, published last week, suggested that there had been a further surge in the Yes vote to 60.7 per cent as against 39.3 No. It is important to note, however, that the question asked of those surveyed for these two TNS/mrbi polls was not a simple one of whether or not they would vote for the Lisbon Treaty.
In November, they were asked how they would vote “if the treaty was modified to allow Ireland to retain a European Union commissioner and other Irish concerns on neutrality, abortion and taxation were clarified in special declarations”.
In February, they were asked how they would vote “in the light of the commitment to allow Ireland to retain a European Union commissioner along with legal guarantees on other Irish concerns about neutrality, abortion and taxation”.
There could be said to have been a considerable “push” element to these questions, since they expressly cite those factors that the Yes campaign will be relying on to bolster their cause in the second referendum.
While the November and February questions may be comparable to each other, they are significantly different to the actual question that will present itself to voters after another intense campaign in which both the Yes and No sides have put their spin on what the guarantees mean.
In addition, whereas these polls measure the views on the Lisbon Treaty among the general adult population, they do not and cannot allow for the variable turnout effect.
For about one-fifth of those who voted in the first referendum were voters who did not go to the polling stations in the previous year’s general election and a similar portion of those who went out to vote in that general election did not bother to vote in the referendum.
There are many regular voters therefore who sat at home for the referendum and many other newer or less active voters who went out and voted No.
The conduct of the campaign itself will determine how many of each of these different voter types goes to the polls in a second referendum, and a rushed campaign is again likely to rouse the disaffected.
Having settled, reluctantly, into the notion of an autumn referendum in Ireland, the other member states may be irked again if we seek unilaterally to expedite the negotiation of the various guarantees. The view of Irish diplomats and European officials seems to be nonetheless that the texts could, if necessary, be finalised in advance of a special European summit scheduled in March.
Even if the guarantees could be agreed quickly, the time is already running out for a pre-summer referendum. Easter this year is on the second weekend in April, and the local and European elections are already set for the Friday after the June bank holiday weekend.
The option of holding the Lisbon referendum with the local and European elections has already been ruled out. Putting at least four weeks between those elections and the referendum means that the only realistic pre-summer dates for a second Lisbon vote is either the week before or the week after the May bank holiday weekend.
Trying to shoehorn any referendum campaign into that tight timescale would raises obvious difficulties. Trying to squeeze a second referendum on an issue as complex and contested as the Lisbon Treaty would be extremely risky.
It would be bordering on the absurd to effectively allow only four weeks for a campaign on a referendum proposal that was rejected on the last occasion because the public felt the time wasn’t taken to explain it to them. In these volatile times, it would be very difficult even to find the space for a sane Lisbon Treaty debate. Our political system is already straining under the pressure of daily screaming matches in the Dáil, recurring banking revelations, job losses and widespread industrial and public sector unrest. Throwing a Lisbon referendum into the mix before the summer could bring the whole lot crashing down.
The retention of our commissioner has helped the Yes case significantly and the economic situation has transformed the context, but it will still take one hell of a campaign from the Yes side to win.
That campaign will have to involve an unprecedented level of co-operation between the main political parties, together with the emergence of a genuinely broad-based non-party civil society campaign.
It will be very difficult to achieve the former before the summer elections, and putting in place the latter will take a lot more time.