Are the EU or Irish Government Dickying the Figures

Pardon the spelling if dickying is incorrect but I highlighted a post earlier today on Open Europe - as much for myself to return to later than anything else and yes those links in the sidebar do change!. They have a copy of the original Commission poll(PDF) that informed the awful reporting in the Independent and Irish Times post Lisbon. You know the one where the Irish were racist buffoons?

Fortunately for me, Donagh has picked it up for me and done the hard work of turning it into a blog post, which I make no apologies for lifting - he is by far the better writer

Full PDF copied below the fold with Donagh’s analysis:

Donagh:

Notice the errors repeated verbatim by the Irish Times. As far as I know 15 – 17 year olds do not have the vote and the tally of percentages comes to 105%, as pointed out by Conor.

According to the OE, this ‘paper’ was ‘pushed around by the Commission’ and leaked to journalist before the Summit on Thursday. The significant difference is that the main reason given in the paper is that 40% of No voters didn’t understand the treaty, putting the blame for the negative vote squarely at the feet of the stupid/lazy electorate. This, of course, formed the basis of much of the commentary last week.

The figure in the official Eurobarometer report for those who didn’t understand the treaty dropped to 22%.

However, it seems that according to Flash Eurobarometer report immigration was only of interest to 1% of those who voted No, and you have to wonder why the Irish Independent made that bit up as its not in the initial paper supplied by a ‘source’ in the European commission. Also, despite the publication of the report on Friday afternoon, Noel Whelan in the IT’s on Saturday was still suggesting that it was a significant factor.