With the Lisbon referendum less than a week away, journalists from across the world are here to gauge the mood. So what do they make of the debate? asks Ruadhán Mac Cormaic, Migration Correspondent.
IN APRIL, I met a puzzled French journalist who had come to Dublin in the hope of writing about the Lisbon treaty referendum campaign but had come up against an obstacle he hadn't foreseen: there was no campaign. He saw few posters, heard little argument, and the rhetorical exchanges, such as they were, seemed to consist mostly of isolated low-level sniping that whizzed safely over people's heads. The journalist sat in on a session of the Forum on Europe, filed a story and left.
He should return. With the referendum now less than a week away and the rest of Europe training a curious eye on an ever-intensifying race, journalists from across the continent have in the past week begun to swell the audiences at press conferences, information sessions and public meetings on the treaty.
With reporters under orders to gauge the eve-of-vote mood, shoppers on O'Connell Street will not get a better opportunity to have their socio-political tuppence-worth on Slovakian television news.
Yesterday the Minister for European Affairs, Dick Roche, held a special briefing for the foreign press at Government buildings, and another one is planned for next week. According to the Department of the Environment, which has responsibility for press accreditation for the central count centre at Dublin Castle, there has been "considerable" foreign interest in the event, with reporters and film crews from Spain, France, Germany, Finland and even Japan among the best represented.
While many have flown in for just a day or two, Thomas Kielinger of the German daily Die Welt was asked by his editors to spend a week travelling the country, and to situate the Lisbon debate in its broader social context. He returned to Dublin on Friday after visiting Rosslare, Cobh, Galway and the Aran islands.
What has struck him most powerfully about the treaty debate, which is attracting "huge interest" in Germany, is that a document such as this is being talked about by the public at all. "I'm very impressed by it . . . It's beautiful to see a population entitled to have an open debate about it. I come from a country where parliamentary rule decides these matters, and people are resigned to not having a say," he says. Amid the maelstrom of issues and impulses that will determine the treaty's fate next week, Kielinger is particularly interested in whether the global financial squeeze will affect people's choices. "One wonders to what extent this feeling of retrenchment and hard times coming along is going to influence the result of the vote and make people feel more negative about Lisbon."
In general, continental media have taken their lead from their Irish counterparts, reporting the ebb and flow of the argument, anchoring their observations on the latest opinion polls and trying as best they can to identify the reasons people are being swayed to either side.
There is a heavy focus on the view from Brussels, and on the potential fallout from a rejection. "Rarely have so few voters caused so many jitters across so many capitals," wrote Stephen Castles in the International Herald Tribune. Under the heading "Irish vote brings European Union to a halt", he noted that the EU has put an "unacknowledged but collective halt on anything controversial - particularly if it might upset Irish sensibilities". The prospect of the referendum being defeated began to receive still more attention yesterday, after the latest Irish Times/TNS mrbi poll found that the number of people intending to vote No has almost doubled in the past three weeks.
Yesterday's Le Monde gave the referendum a full page, and in a lengthy piece by Marion Van Renterghem, from Tullamore, seeks to explain the strength of the No campaign. She points to the dizzying array of themes raised by the No side and the Yes advocates' struggle to respond to "the disorder of the charges, whether true or false". She also senses a certain "feeling of exasperation", reminiscent of France's European constitution campaign of 2005, towards the political, trade unionist and media elite, most of whom advocate a Yes. "Celtic calamity?" was how another title put it.
It's not the first time that headlines like that have appeared in European press coverage of an Irish EU referendum, of course, and memories of 2001 loom large in the minds of visiting observers. One journalist admits that her newspaper, like many others, was caught out that time when it didn't send anyone to cover the first Nice treaty referendum, which turned out to be one of the major European stories of the year. "So this time I'm here for the whole week," she says.
In some countries, the ample appetite for news from Ireland reflects wider trends. The size of the Polish press contingent is due not only to the fact that the fallout could be so widely felt, but because migration between the two countries has brought Ireland so much closer in the past five years.
Dominika Pszczolkowska of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's best-selling quality paper, has noticed that the style of campaigning differs markedly between the two countries. Here, posters, local meetings and house-calling are of major importance, whereas in Poland campaigns are won and lost on television, helped by the free airtime that parties and campaigning groups are given to put their cases across.
Rob Burley, a producer with the BBC who is in Dublin to prepare for a special TV broadcast next week, senses a difference in tone between opponents of the Lisbon treaty here and those anti-EU voices he hears in Britain. "It tends very much to be about sovereignty issues in the UK. There seems to be a much more general positive feeling here about Europe, but there are particular worries that they might have about specific things in the treaty, about tax or about the neutrality issue," he says.
When a well-known journalist from the left-leaning French daily Libération turned to Ireland's referendum in a blog entry last month, he posted samples of the campaign posters and remarked rather glibly that if this was the level of debate one could expect on the treaty, then maybe it was just as well France didn't put it to the people. That observation might have been fatuously framed, but should we assume that just because there is more talk about the EU and its institutions that people here are better-informed than elsewhere? Not necessarily, says Thomas Kielinger, but at least people can hear the arguments for and against, and the information is easily accessible for anyone who wants it.
The treaty is a complex piece of work, but it doesn't help matters that the debate is at once about more and less than the document contains, argues Dominika Pszczolkowska, who is surprised to hear so much discussion of issues that she believes are marginal, if not irrelevant. "All those arguments that are repeated about abortion or the neutrality discussion, it's not really being said what the treaty changes. On abortion, for example, I can't see any change at all. I can't recall the word even being mentioned in the treaty." Pszczolkowska, who travelled to Castlebar, Co Mayo, this week to watch Declan Ganley of Libertas on the campaign trail, describes how she was approached by a woman at one meeting and told: "I'm voting against because they're going to bring in abortion and prostitution and, what's that third one? Eu . . . eu . . . euthanasia."
This is not a specifically Irish tendency. When she visited those states that were voting on their EU accession treaties in advance of joining in 2004, Pszczolkowska found the same dynamic at play. "I went to Hungary, and I remember they were very worried that their poppy-seed dumplings, which are a delicacy, would be banned. I was thinking: poppy-seed dumplings? Where does the treaty mention poppy-seed dumplings? With documents like these, you're bound to get lots of things that are not in the treaty."
Few are willing to speculate on how all of this will influence the outcome. All agree on the strength of the No campaign, but caution that those they meet at public meetings are probably already convinced. The key to the outcome lies in the shaded slice of the pie charts: the don't knows. "I'm not sure myself how it will end, but I don't think the yes votes can be taken for granted," says Thomas Kielinger. "I think it's going to be a cliffhanger."