Irish Say No To 2nd Lisbon Referendum

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/mick_fealty/blog/2008/07/28/71_per_cent_of_irish_people_do_not_want_a_lisbon_ii




71 per cent of Irish people do not want a Lisbon II

Mick Fealty

Monday, July 28, 2008, 05:37 PM GMT [

General]

The Irish Foreign Minister, Micheál Martin, is not happy. A survey carried out by leading Irish pollster Red C Research has discovered that a massive 71 per cent of those polled do not want to vote in a second referendum. The sample was of just over 1000 respondents (Mori considers 1,000 sufficient to replicate the results from higher samples).

The EurActive site

extrapolates the figures for the poll into a future referendum and concludes that: The new figures would mean that, compared to the first run on 12 June, where 53.4 per cent of the Irish rejected the text the no camp could further increase its lead by 6 percentage points to a commanding 24-point lead in a rerun.

But the reason the Minister gives for being so unhappy is that it was commissioned by the London based Eurosceptic think tank,

Open Europe. He considers it a meddling exercise in Irish internal affairs: "I would like to know what prompted a British organisation with a strong ideological bias to commission a poll into Irish attitudes to Europe at this time. Ireland's future in Europe is a matter for decision by Irish people."

A fair enough point so far as it goes, especially given the troubled history between the two countries. Except, as Lorraine Mullally of Open Europe tells Brassneck: "How is it interfering to ask people how they might vote in a future re-run referendum? It's not as though it hasn't happened before, look at Nice? It's clear that people don't want a referendum. The truth is the government is panicking, since it's strategy of taking the country back to the polls is in trouble".

There have been accusations from

Dick Roche, the Minister of State for European Affairs, that the questions were 'extraordinarily skewed' on Newstalk yesterday morning. That is, perhaps, a line the Minister would be well advised not to pursue too rigourously.

In the immediate wake of the referendum, my Brassneck colleague Richard asked

why had there been no official exit poll from the national broadcaster RTE? He also picked up on a mystery at the time: ie, the selective leaking of the results of a EuroBarometer poll to certain papers days before the actual results were released: But much, much worse is this selective leaking of information from an unpublished poll, supposedly a flash Eurobarometer survey. That selective leaking is driving debate, and is going to further increase distrust in politicians - in Dublin and Brussels - based on confusion.

The poll should have been published properly, on the EU website, so that it could have been interrogated properly by lots of different people. What was the methodology? What research company was used? Where were they based? What were the questions? What are the demographic cross-tabs? Who actually commissioned it? Were there unprompted response questions? Did interviewers probe further on responses like "I didn't understand the treaty"?

In the end, there was, as

Open Europe reports on it its own blog, some serious discrepancies in detail between these briefings and the actual results when they were finally came out:
The Times story on 18 June ran with the headline "Irish voters failed to understand the Lisbon Treaty", citing a figure from the EU Commission stating that, amongst No voters, "40 per cent blamed the fact that they did not understand the treaty."

By then of course, the selective briefing had already driven and given shape to the national debate. It looks like a serious attempt, by the European Commission/Irish government to skew the terms on which that debate took place. This latest poll seems purer than the driven snow by comparison. And

it is already beginning to make itself felt on the super coalition of government and opposition.

This is likely to continue to be a multilateral battle of wills, with British Eurosceptics, French centralists, and an Irish government unused to being 'called' on it own strategic mores battling for significant mind share of the Irish people.

- Mick Fealty