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 [
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
But the reason the Minister gives for being so unhappy is that it was commissioned by the London based Eurosceptic think tank,
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
In the immediate wake of the referendum, my Brassneck colleague Richard asked
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
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
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