The politicians on the yes side were not hamstrung by a lack of “selling point” no more so than combatting the irrationalism of conscription arguments. Instead they were caught on the hop, badly briefed and badly prepared.

They had a charter of fundamental rights that suddenly allowed them to promote the langugage of human/workers rights but they blew it because they didnt manage the unions. They had a lot of “good points” in there and no way of communicating them.

The law/contract analogy only works if the lawyer appears to be fully competent in their presentation of the contract, ours were nowhere near that standard.

Sessions in the Dail explaining the treaty were attended by about 20% of deputies overall. It was a sign of how interested they were in campaigning 12 months after a GE and 12 before a LE.

I imagine your lawyer would probably advise you to sign, if he knew what it meant. Yes, Lisbon was/is complicated but then so were Nice, Amsterdam, Maastricht, the Single European Act and Rome. What made the difference this time round was the the ‘yes’ side didn’t have any big idea to sell. In the past this was economic prosperity and in the second Nice referendum is was enlargement.

Sorry are you twelve? We like to keep the discussion on Irish election at a decent polite level, use of degagorty terms like retard is not aceptable. Just because you think it is ok to make degagorty terms about mental illness does not mean we have to accept it.

We have really shot ourselcves in the foot with this one. Voting no doesnt make you some kind of a rebel, it makes you a retard. The economy was already getting worse, we knew we were headed for a recession and what did we do? throw the treaty back in the EU’s face.Wasn’t it the EU who helped us make our way out of the recession of the eighties? Well there is no better deal, in fact Irish concerns were taken into account every step of the way in the 8 year process of drafting of the treaty, anyone who said otherwise lied.
Who would be stupid enough to listen to the far left and right when it comes to the EU? What answers do they have for us now on how we are going to get ourselves out of this mess?

Your ‘top 6′ are probably the key reasons for the ‘no’ vote. But in the way these things are in referenda, there are probably more than 800,000 reasons why people voted no, if we could discern them. The excellence of your post is that you synthesised those feelings into six coherent arguments, which I would not dispute, and for which I hope I conveyed my admiration and respect that you had managed to do this in so short a time?

No doubt the comments I added would allow you to extend the number of reasons to eight, or more depending if other commentators come along with other points of analysis to add to the mix. I guess that’s what is going to make it so difficult for our government representatives in the next week – how do they explain the ‘no’ vote to their European counterparts since there is no one reason they can latch on to as an explanation? What do we want? Do we know what it is ourselves?

Politically this is a terrible mess and I get the feeling from the intial reaction of the rest of Europe is that their gut reaction is that it is our problem; that we can go and sort it out ourselves. What I found interesting listening to the radio debate this evening was the way in which so many of the ‘no’ side leaders shied away from making any proposals as to what it is we should do next. Instead they seemed content to keep reciting the old propaganda mantras of a debate which they had already won, even if was now suddenly apparent that it had been won on false pretences about a whole range of issues from corporate taxation to militarisation of the EU to special interest issues like abortion.

Back in the 1980s I remember the first referendum on divorce and campaigning on it and I particularly remember the results – the same constituencies that today voted ‘yes’ to Lisbon today (in Dublin anyway), were those who also voted in favour of divorce back then. At the time I remember thinking we should reconstitute the old Dublin Pale of the 1600s; completely intolerant of course on my part, but I can attribute that, and may even excuse it, to my age at the time and my aspirations that we might live in a society that genuinely cared for the rights of others and respected the circumstances of lives that were very different to our own.

I think the first thing we all need to do now is a bit of thinking about who we are and where we want to go as a member of the EU. The ‘no’ vote in Ireland does a lot of damage to the EU in general. That may be unintentional on our part, but we are going to have to live with and bear the consequences of that. Maybe the best thing would be a referendum that asks the simple question: do we want to be part of the EU or not?

The worst outcome of all this is that Ireland may eventually end up having to to implement EU laws deriving from Lisbon without ever having any say on how those laws are devised. Bit like Norway – required to implement EU standards arising from EU Directives, but no seat at the table when same are being framed. except Norway has oil reserves. What do we have as a compensation?