From a vacuum to the void Why the Irish voted against the Lisbon treaty is unclear – but it was the lack of establishment opposition that kickstarted the ‘No’ campaign.

On 12 June, as we all now know, the Irish people rejected the Treaty of Lisbon. Never one to miss a political wrestling match on my native soil, I had taken a week's holiday and headed home to campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote. The mood I found in Ireland was unlike anything I had seen before, a toxic mix of apathy, confusion and fear. I still believe the Irish are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the European project, and so I find myself facing the same question as most European politicians: Where did it all go wrong?

The treaty had the overwhelming support of mainstream political parties, so much so that 81.7% of voters in the last election supported a party that was actively campaigning for a ‘Yes’. Only one party in the Dáil, the Irish parliament, opposed the treaty – the left-wing nationalist Sinn Féin, representing just under 7% of the electorate. One party – the Greens – was too divided internally to take an official line, but all six of its deputies, who serve in the governing coalition, actively campaigned in favour of the Treaty.

The treaty also had the support of the business community, the trade unions, and – eventually – the farmers' associations. This huge imbalance in favour of the treaty is central to understanding the dynamic that emerged in the referendum campaign. With all major civil-society actors in favour of the treaty, a huge political vacuum opened up on the ‘No’ side.

And rich rewards await those who fill a political vacuum. Anti-Lisbon campaigners seized the opportunity, securing publicity and recognition – much of it guaranteed, because state broadcasters were obliged by law to give equal airtime to both sides of the referendum divide on all panel discussions, debates and talk shows.

This led to an absurd situation in which media producers had to go searching for speakers who opposed the treaty. Ministers and senior politicians in favour of the treaty were pitted against unelected community activists and lobbyists fresh out of college, for the simple reason that there were so few notable public figures who opposed the treaty. The effect on the Irish political landscape has been dramatic. In the course of the campaign, a number of previously low-key figures from the political extremes have been turned into household names.

A guerrilla war against the political establishment

Even so, the battle remained lopsided, with all the mainstream political parties on one side and, at best, marginal political forces on the other. But while the ‘Yes’ side had plenty of commanding political figures, it discovered it lacked foot soldiers, enthusiastic believers willing to stand on street corners and knock on doors and fight for the treaty. The ‘No’ side, in contrast, had an army of young activists, fired by a sense of mission and purpose that won the hearts of many voters.

I make no apologies for the military analogies: every evening, particularly in the run-up to the vote, I felt like I was coming home from a day of trench warfare.

In many ways, the dynamic of the debate resembled the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the US, a clash between old politics and new politics

Or, perhaps, guerrilla warfare, for the ‘Yes’ camp was assaulted from all sides, by four different factions with varying motives and tactics.

Only one, the nationalist faction, included members of the Dáil: four Sinn Féin deputies. The treaty would result in lost influence, sovereignty and neutrality: these were the claims the nationalists made. They highlighted the loss of a commissioner and the proposed changes to voting rules in the Council of Ministers as signs that Ireland would lose its voice in Europe. It was repeatedly claimed that in the Council “Ireland's vote is halved and Germany's vote is doubled”, a claim that ignores half of the voting procedure. Its party leader, Gerry Adams, asked the taoiseach (prime minister), Brian Cowen, to return to his EU counterparts and renegotiate the treaty, while Sinn Féin posters promised voters that “Ireland can get a better deal”.

The far-left faction was keen to steer the campaign to a debate similar to the one that occurred in France when it was voting on the proposed Constitutional Treaty, the choice between a “Social Europe” and a “Corporate Europe”. Its members cast doubt amongst voters on the EU's commitment to workers and union recognition. Referring liberally to a number of past rulings by the European Court of Justice, they assured voters that the EU would force Ireland to privatise public services. The far-left parties – none of which were represented in the Dáil – were also very effective at using anti-war sentiment to raise fears of the implications of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) aspects of the treaty.

A third faction consisted of far-right Christian groups, who – to the consternation of Catholic bishops – were arguably the most willing to make spurious claims about the content of the treaty. A newly founded lobby group, Cóir (Irish for “justice”), was particularly active, and although it did not publicly acknowledge any affiliations, the address of its office is the same as that of Youth Defence, a controversial anti-abortion group. Voters were told that the Charter of Fundamental Rights would force Ireland to legalise abortion, gay marriage, prostitution and euthanasia. Although these claims were roundly dismissed by campaigners on both sides of the campaign, they still found their way onto unattributed posters across the country.

The fourth faction, Libertas, was the wild card of the campaign. This previously unheard-of group, which described itself as a ‘think-tank’, launched a surprisingly professional campaign against the unsuspecting establishment. The group was founded by Declan Ganley, an entrepreneur with no history in Irish politics. Reputed to have amassed over €300 million in a career that started in commodity dealing in the crumbling Soviet Union, Ganley could be described as something of an Irish oligarch. However, Libertas insist that all their funding has come from individual donors giving no more than €6348.69 each.

The Libertas campaign focused on claims that the Lisbon treaty was undemocratic and bad for the Irish economy, pointing in particular to the prospect of future tax harmonisation. Ireland's low corporate-tax rates are often celebrated as a key factor in turning Ireland into a “Celtic tiger” and in the economic boom that the country enjoyed intermittently from the mid-1990s until 2007. While the group enjoyed only minority support in the business community, it communicated its message effectively to voters. All televised debates and discussions invariably included an articulate and well-informed Libertas speaker, and they offered sceptical voters a seemingly mainstream voice to trust in a field otherwise crowded by the political extremes.

“At last a ‘Yes’ campaigner - where are the rest of you?”

In many ways, the dynamic of the debate resembled the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the US, a clash between old politics and new politics. The political establishment worked on the assumption that it would win, and when unexpectedly faced with a dynamic force in opposition it was unable to react. The ‘Yes’ side focused on the past, reminding voters of the benefits EU membership has already brought, while the ‘No’ side set its sights set firmly on what a future EU might look like.

While the four anti-Lisbon factions filled the streets of Dublin with young eager activists, the pro-Lisbon political parties found many of their members less informed and perhaps less motivated. While handing out fliers on Dublin's main shopping street several people remarked to me that they had yet to be approached by pro-treaty campaigners. As the vote neared and the main political parties panicked at the prospect of losing, they did manage to mobilise their grassroots members – but at that stage most voters had already made up their minds or lost interest.

The war on the web was even more imbalanced. A number of slick anti-treaty websites emerged, and their snappy slogans and flash graphics left the factual pro-treaty websites looking dull. The anti-treaty websites were very effective in using Google's advertising service to bring in voters doing their research online.

As for finance, Libertas was the only group to properly tap the fundraising potential of the internet, a strategy that provided it with a campaign budget unmatched by any political party. When asked how much the group was planning to spend on the campaign, Ganley famously replied “as much as we need to spend”. Most estimates suggest the think tank's total expenditure was over €1.3 million, while Fianna Fáil, the largest pro-treaty party, spent an estimated €700,000 on its campaign.

“I don't understand it, so I'm voting No”

The result was a remarkable turnaround. Six months ago, polls showed that a strong majority favoured the treaty, but by the eve of the vote, the pro-treaty side was spending so much energy refuting the reasons to vote ‘No’ that it was unable to communicate the reasons to vote ‘Yes’.

Beaten on the ground by the ‘No’ campaigners, the ‘Yes’ camp also failed in the information war. The taoiseach who negotiated the text, Bertie Ahern, refused to publish the most basic information – the referendum date – until the last minute, a move which left voters feeling they were being taken for granted. His resignation, because of a financial scandal, then hogged the headlines for a further three weeks. And so by the time the mainstream political parties started to focus on the treaty the ‘No’ side had already gained momentum.

And while opponents of Lisbon set the agenda for discussion with short, simple slogans, the ‘Yes’ camp was hampered its efforts to distil the treaty into compelling slogans by the treaty itself. By the time the referendum arrived, every home in the country knew it was an unwieldy document, because each home had received an independent guide to the treaty from the Referendum Commission. The result could be seen in surveys that suggest the Lisbon treaty was ultimately rejected because many Irish voters did not understand what they were voting on or why they were voting on it.

So, even if the ‘Yes’ camp had fought a better ground war, it would have been vulnerable to a structural weakness – it had a complicated treaty to sell and it was faced with an opposition all too willing to oversimplify it.

In the aftermath, for those who watched events unfold on the ground, one thing seemed clear: Nobody was to blame and everybody was to blame. Perhaps, as the political editor of the Irish Times, Stephen Collins, argued, the result was “not so much a protest vote against the Irish government and not so much a vote against the treaty” as a “a vote against almost everything... a vote against politics.”

Lui Smyth is currently a stagiaire at the European Parliament.