According to participants at the EU’s post-Irish referendum summit in Brussels, the atmosphere among the 27 national leaders is not one of crisis or despair, but resignation and a sense of having been there and done all this before – i.e., after the French and Dutch threw out the old constitutional treaty in 2005.

However, it’s also clear there are more than a few mutual recriminations going on in the corridors of the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels. “It’s what I’d call the ‘day after effect’,” says one top-level EU official, referring to last week’s Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty.

If Ireland is a problem, what does that make the Czech Republic? The Czechs have been resisting efforts to include a line in the final summit communiqué that would emphasise the EU’s efforts to go ahead with national ratifications of the treaty in spite of the Irish No. This is irritating some delegations, who think the Czechs are riding on the coat-tails of the Irish rather than doing the decent thing – or the courageous thing – and joining the rest of the EU in defending the Lisbon treaty.

The situation at present is that the Czech Senate (upper house of parliament) has sent the Lisbon treaty to the nation’s constitutional court for scrutiny. President Vaclav Klaus has declared the treaty dead – the only EU head of state to go so far. The Irish No, meanwhile, has emboldened critics of the treaty in the ruling Civic Democrat party, whose hold on power is not particularly strong. All of which makes Czech ratification of Lisbon far from a done deal.

Mirek Topolanek, the Czech prime minister, is giving private assurances that his government will ratify Lisbon. But when Czech officials appear in front of TV cameras at the summit, they are saying something subtly different. For example, Alexandr Vondra, the Czech minister for European affairs, says the Lisbon treaty is “in the parking lot” and a jolly good thing, too. ”Don’t press us. Any pressure could be counter-productive,” Vondra warns.

In the end, the Czechs may have to buckle. They are due to take over the EU’s rotating presidency next January, and it would create a disastrous impression if, when they move into the hot seat, they were seen as bad team players.

But if I were a betting man, I would not expect the Czechs to have ratified Lisbon by the EU’s next summit on October 15-16.

According to the memorable aphorism of Robert Kagan, the conservative US scholar, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. But when President George W. Bush was in Europe last week and heard about Ireland’s rejection of the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in a referendum, it must have seemed to the outgoing president that Europeans are so incapable of getting their act together that they’re really from Pluto – which astronomers no longer classify as a planet.

The same thought may cross the mind of President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia when EU leaders arrive next week in the western Siberian city of Khanty-Mansiysk for an EU-Russia summit. Of course, it’s possible Medvedev will be rather more exercised about the revelation that the US has been thinking about putting part of its proposed missile defence system in Lithuania - which is precisely the sort of things that Martians, rather than Plutonians, do. 

Today the leaders of the EU’s 27 member-states are rolling into Brussels for a summit whose main theme, before the crisis erupted over the Lisbon treaty, was supposed to be a robust European response to soaring fuel and food prices. Of course, there isn’t much the EU can do on that front, either, because in the end it’s mostly a question of world demand and supply.

Still, I don’t buy the oft-heard argument that EU leaders are totally out of touch with public opinion. Take last Monday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. Much breast-beating went on there about whether the Irish referendum result showed that the EU was too technocratic and too elitist. According to two people who attended the discussions, one foreign minister – Radek Sikorski of Poland – even burst out: “Why don’t we write treaties that even we in this room can understand?”

A question to shake up any solar system!  

In the Orwellian world of the European Union, no does not really mean no, a treaty pronounced dead by popular vote is still alive and the bloc’s parliament rejects the popular vote as undemocratic.

Ireland may have rejected the Lisbon treaty, which requires the approval of all 27 member states to become law, but the EU’s leaders have vowed to press ahead with ratification.

Perhaps most baffling of all is the European parliament’s reaction. The speaker of the people’s elected assembly, Hans-Gert Pottering, said: “It is of course a great disappointment for all those who wanted to achieve greater democracy, greater political effectiveness and greater clarity and transparency in decision-making in the European Union that the majority of the Irish could not be convinced of the need for these reforms of the European Union.”

I’ll let you read that again. Yes, these citizens were wrong. Through exercising their democratic right to vote they have delivered a blow to democracy. What Pottering really means, and he has a point, is they have delivered a blow to the expansion of the powers of the parliament. It was the biggest potential winner of this reform.

At the moment around two-thirds of legislation has to win the approval of parliament. Under the treaty it would get new powers over farm policy, trade, justice and other areas. This could be a good thing but the problem is that too often the 785 MEPs, unheralded in their own countries and dependent on party patronage for their seats, get captured by special interests.

Parliament’s agriculture committee features more farmers than a barn dance. Trade debates tend to be dominated by members briefed by NGOs. Things are improving slowly, with the parliament fighting stirring battles on civil liberties issues and holding member states to their promises on environment and energy. Yet they will not improve fast as long as the people do not care. The next elections in 2009 could see turnout across the bloc fall below 50 per cent.

The assembly, which has already adopted the trappings of the dead constitution such as playing the Ode to Joy to visiting heads of state, threw its usual fit of pique when meeting on Monday in Strasbourg. It was “inconceivable” that the EU could expand further without reform, it said. In other words, what was good enough for those who got in early is not good enough for the latecomers: blackmail.

Paul Van Buitenen, the whistleblowing auditor whose revelations of corruption and nepotism brought down the commission in 1999 and who is now an MEP, sums up the dilemma well.
 
The EU has become frozen in transition from national states to a supranational system. National parliaments now mostly implement rules decided in Brussels yet they are where most citizens believe power lies and where most media attention is focused. The Brussels institutions make most of the laws but nobody pays them much attention.

 “We cannot continue with this halfway house. Either we move forward to having a proper European parliament with real powers to hold the executive to account. Or we return power to national parliaments and continue as separate nation states,” he told me recently.

The Irish seem to have opted for the latter. Pottering has not: “We must now calmly reflect on how to proceed. The reform of the European Union is important for citizens, for democracy and transparency.  Therefore I hope that it will be possible to find a solution so that reforms can come into force by the time of the European elections in June 2009,” he said.

Let’s have a vote on it.

Talking of votes, the house will vote on Wednesday on whether to approve Jacques Barrot’s move from transport to justice commissioner and Antonio Tajani of Italy as his replacement.

It should go reasonably smoothly. Indeed, there could barely have been a dry eye in the civil liberties committee on Monday night at Barrot’s hearing. “As a child I was impressed by Robert Schuman, who was a friend of my father, while my adult years have been marked by all the struggles to advance the European project,” he intoned.

Its 3pm on a cloudy Dublin Friday, and, as the results of the Irish referendum come flooding in, it could hardly be more clear what a kick in the teeth – and possibly to another part of the political establishment’s anatomy -  the Irish electorate has delivered by rejecting the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

Tipperary North: 50.2 per cent No to 49.8 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 58.5 per cent… Tipperary South: 53.2 per cent No to 46.8 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 55 per cent… Waterford: 54.3 per cent No to 45.6 per cent Yes, on a turn-out of 53 per cent…Limerick East: 53.9 per cent No to 46.1 per cent Yes on a turn-out of 51 per cent.

The Limerick East result was especially significant, because its voting patterns often reflect trends at a national level.

And of course, the No campaigners are ecstatic. But they are not depicting their victory as a defeat for the EU – far from it. “this is not a eurosceptic message at all, ” Declan Ganley, the self made businessman and promient No campaigner, told Irish radio. “We want to be at the heart of Europe, but it’s got to be accountable to the will of its citizens.”

Ganley reckons that Irish premier Brian Cowen can go to the EU summit of heads of state and government in Brussels next Thursday and Friday “and look for a better deal for the Irish people” than is contained in the Lisbon treaty.

But what exactly can Ireland ask for? For one thing, Ganley proposes that Ireland be allowed to keep its European commissioner – Lisbon foresees abolishing the automatic right of all 27 member-states to their own commissioner. For another, Ganley suggests changing the new weighted EU voting rules, based partly on the size of a country’s population, that are contained in Lisbon.

Eeek! The voting rules are impossible for average Europeans to understand, but some may recall that when the Polish government was complaining about them last year it marched into a summit battle under the slogan: “The square root or death!”

What will it be this time? “The distance formula in Cartesian co-ordinates, or we’re off”?

At 12 O’clock on Friday, after three hours of counting in the Irish referendum, it is starting to look as if Irish voters have rejected the European Union’s Lisbon treaty - and, to borrow a phrase from the late Saddam Hussein, touched off the mother of all political crises in Europe.

“We’re not calling it, but it looks like it’s going to be No,” one senior government official told the Financial Times.

“It looks like a majority have voted No,” confirmed Lucinda Creighton, director of the referendum campaign for Fine Gael, the main opposition party, which supports the Lisbon treaty.

And this is also pretty much the view of the reporters for the state broadcasting network RTE who have fanned out across Ireland and who are watching the local counts. They are saying that the No vote on Thursday was especially strong in urban working-class districts and in rural areas.

If it really is No, Ireland’s three main political parties – the ruling Fianna Fáil and the opposition Fine Gael and Labour – will have a lot to answer for. Despite agreeing on the need for a Yes vote, they often sniped among themselves about how effective each party’s pro Lisbon campaign was.

It did not help that Bertie Ahern, the former Fianna Fáil leader, was forced to resign last month because of the negative effect of continuing public inquires into his personal financial affairs. Brian Cowen took over as premier but it may have been too late to make a difference.

As for the rest of Europe, it looks as if even if Ireland has voted No, the French, Germans and everyone else will say; “The ratification of Lisbon must go ahead.”

The question that will really need looking at, though, will be: “Why does the EU find is so difficult to sell itself to the voters?”

The moment Dermot Ahern, Irish justice minister, conceded that defeat was inevitable yesterday lunchtime the action in Brussels, shifted from the Berlaymont, the 13-storey star-shaped home of the European Commission, to a scruffy Irish bar on the other side of the street.

No campaign activists clustered in the shadow of the ‘Berlaymonster” they loathe, to celebrate the Irish rejection of the Lisbon treaty. It felt as though they had been joined in Kitty O’Shea’s by almost every reporter and camera crew in town. Even supporters of the Yes campaign were drawn to Kitty O’Shea’s in order to find a journalist to give their views to. With a pint (sorry half-litre), of Guinness in one hand, Nigel Farage, leader of the eurosceptic UK Independence party, accosted Andrew Duff, the British Liberal MEP who had played a role in drafting the original constitution. Would he accept defeat, Mr Farage demanded? Certainly not to him, was the riposte, before Mr Duff stomped off to address the waiting microphones.

It was as raw as genteel Brussels gets. “We keep asking the people and they keep saying No,” whooped Mr Farage – or, as another supporter of the No vote put it: “three out of three isn’t bad”.

After the Dutch and French rejection of the constitution that forced Brussels back to spend “a period of reflection” before going back to the drawing board to draw up the Lisbon Treaty, there was a sense of déjà vu. But this blow may be harder for Brussels to recover from. As each No result was displayed on the pub’s big screen TV a cheer went up. But the biggest roar was reserved for the appearance of MEP Kathy Sinnott, at the Cork count. The independent Brussels politician who was one of only two MEP to oppose the treaty. Her son was in the pub audience.

Joady Sinnott, 35, works for his mum and said: “This vote was not anti-Europe. The Irish love Europe. But if it is going to get more powers it has to get more democratic.” Gerard MaCarthy, an Irish waiter at the pub, disagreed. “I would have voted yes,” he said. “The Irish should remember all the money we got for infrastructure. It was only 60 years ago that Europe was at war. We should try to improve it not reject it.” Waiting for some word, any word, from the Commission – protocol decreed that Irish leaders speak first – diplomats huddle in corners plotting the future.

“There are a couple of ways forward,” joked one. “We could wait for climate change to drown Ireland or, since it’s halfway across the Atlantic anyway, tell them to join Nafta.”

Today’s referendum is for Irish voters and the question is about Europe. But one of the paradoxes of modern Ireland and the confident role it plays in European affairs is that America’s presence is felt – and celebrated – everywhere in the country. Take O’Dea’s Hotel, a family-run establishment is the town of Loughrea, County Galway.

As I walked into the lobby at 8 o’clock this morning , having spent three hours driving west from Dublin and talking to bleary-eyed voters in Loughrea as they emerged from their polling station, whose face should I spot beaming at me from a photo on the reception desk but that of Bill Clinton.

The ex-president was a frequent visitor to Ireland during this eight years in office, as was, according to local accounts – his daughter Chelsea. Both were made exceptionally welcome, as US presidents and their families always have been in Ireland.

But it so happens that some years ago Loughrea was designated Ireland’s “Eurotown”, in a project that saw several dozen local small businesses switch to the euro from the old Irish pound on an accelerated basis. Their experiences were then used to help small businesses elsewhere in Ireland get used to the single European currency.

There’s not a lot in Loughrea these days to remind you that it was once Eurotown. But in the surrounding countryside you see quite a a few No campaign posters, put up by those who want Ireland to reject the European Union’s Lisbon treaty.

Though I have nothing against Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, one of the most eye-catching No posters is the one that displays a huge pitchfork and the words : “Tell Mandelson where to stick it.”

Be that as it may, the fact is that American culture, American business practices, American investment and American people are a big part of what makes modern Ireland tick and feel proud of itself. The Irish have achieved the clever and admirable feat of making themselves liked in Europe without sacrificing their close connections with the US.

In some countries on the Continent, a European identity is treated as something that almost by definition must be in opposition to America. Not so in Ireland.

There is a lesson there for another island on the north-west coast of Europe, that’s for sure.