THE KEY factor in persuading the Irish electorate to ratify the Lisbon Treaty in the second referendum was a sense of vulnerability arising out of the economic crisis, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin said in Dublin yesterday.
“The key theme to emerge in the research was the sense of economic vulnerability,” the Minister told the annual international affairs conference at the Royal Irish Academy.
“In terms of the ‘switcher’, the person who changed from voting No the last time to Yes this time, the economic crisis was a big factor and had impact on the politics of Ireland’s engagement with Europe. That does suggest though for the future that we have significant work to do, to re-engage with significant cohorts of our own population in terms of the European Union.
“A lot of the statistics that came out of the research into the last referendum [in June 2008] indicate that those under 40 do not have the same enthusiasm as older generations would have for the European ideal.” He added: “The economic crisis had a very fundamental impact on the state of mind of the voter in Ireland.”
People had “the sense that collectively working with our European colleagues actually was the best way out of the current crisis, that we couldn’t do it on our own”.
In a question and answer session, Rose Drea, a postgraduate student of international relations at University College Cork, told the Minister that among her generation of 18- to 24-year-olds, “nobody knew what it [the referendum] was about”.
Mr Martin responded: “What does the EU call its research programme? SP7. Now go out there to Dawson Street in an hour’s time and ask anyone walking up and down: ‘Isn’t SP7 a wonderful programme?’ It’s €50 billion. But the EU has done its best to hide it from the public.”
The Minister also complained about the use of esoteric acronyms like Gaerc (general affairs and external relations council) – the foreign ministers’ forum – and Coreper (the committee of permanent representatives) which is made up of senior civil servants.
Prof Valur Ingimundarson from the University of Iceland said responsibility for the economic collapse in his country was placed on those in charge of the banks and major firms, but “the political elite however, was also heavily implicated because of its negligence and collusion with business interests”.
“Many other social groups behaved irresponsibly,” he said, including academics who were “also complicit”. But the scale of the crisis would not have been so colossal were it not for “the recklessness of the business elite”.
