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Perhaps it’s just bravado, or the effects of one extra Guinness for the road, but the Yes camp appears less nervous than you might think. On Tuesday night, only 36 hours before the polls open for Ireland’s referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, an adviser to an Irish government minister reviewed the state of the world from his seat in a Dublin bar and confided that he expected a 52 to 48 per cent victory for the pro-Lisbon forces.

This morning, I put his forecast to a prominent businessman in the Irish capital. “Oh really? I’d heard 53 to 47,” he replied.

Whether either of these predictions owes anything to the private polling that is being conducted around the Emerald Isle is not entirely clear. The No camp, for its part, has a point when it says the most recent published polls show the anti-Lisbon vote steadily going up. “We’re not taking a single vote for granted,” says Declan Ganley, the leader of the anti-Lisbon Libertas movement.

 By common consent, a great deal depends on the turn-out. It was the low turn-out of about 35 per cent that caused the upset No vote in Ireland’s referendum on the EU’s Nice treaty in June 2001. When the Irish voted again on the treaty in October 2002, the turn-out was 49 per cent and the result was a convincing Yes victory.

On Thursday, experts say that a turn-out of 45 per cent or more of Ireland’s 3.05m voters should be sufficient for the Lisbon treaty to squeeze through.

 But it may not be quite so simple. According to an Irish Times poll published on June 6, 70 per cent of respondents said they were very likely to vote in the referendum. Even if such a high turn-out is improbable, some analysts say that much  “soft opinion” - people who are not especially pro -or anti-European and who may not even have decided whether to bother to vote on Thursday - is trending in a No direction.

If this is so, a high turn-out - say, between 60 and 70 per cent - may not work to the advantage of the Yes forces. “As things stand, we may very well see a situation where a very low turn-out favours the No side,  a medium turn-out favours the Yes side, and a very large turn-out might just favour the No side,” writes Harry McGee of the Irish Times political staff.

A dozen campaign volunteers standing around a large white truck, a dozen reporters with microphones and notebooks, and a handful of pedestrians trying to squeeze past on the pavement: this wasn’t exactly the largest crowd at a political event in Dublin’s history.

But if Declan Ganley, the self-made businessman who is one of the loudest voices calling on Irish voters to reject the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in Thursday’s referendum, was disappointed by the low turn-out, he was giving nothing away. 

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon in the Irish capital, and Ganley had summoned the media to admire his final campaign poster, about to be plastered in various public places around the city. Next to a picture of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the poster proclaims: “Good for him, bad for us. Vote No to Lisbon.”

France seems to be playing an unusually large role in Ireland’s referendum. It was only on Monday that French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner suggested that the rest of Europe would view the Irish as selfish ingrates if they voted No in spite of having received billions of euros in EU funds over the last 35 years.

For some of the Irish reporters milling near Ganley’s truck, however, the focus of interest wasn’t France or the new poster but how Ganley has been financing his campaign. The questioning was pretty aggressive, but it looked to me as if Ganley held his nerve.

On the other hand, a stunt he tried to pull off on Monday didn’t go quite according to plan. Having said the leaders of Ireland’s three main political parties should all go to Brussels on Friday to renegotiate the EU treaty if it is defeated the day before, Ganley announced he had bought Aer Lingus plane tickets in advance for each of them.

Unfortunately, the ticket purchased for Irish premier Brian Cowen spelled the passenger’s name “Brian Cowan”.

China’s hunger for African raw materials is well-known. Less well-known, but utterly fascinating, are the stratagems which China uses to satisfy its hunger.

A few months ago, some officials from Beijing were being shown around Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, which is located in Tervuren on the outskirts of Brussels. Known for short as the Africa Museum, this is one of the world’s great anthropological, zoological and geological institutes, with wonderful collections of ethnographic objects, insects and tropical wood as well as an active scientific research centre.

The Africa Museum houses the archives of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the Victorian explorer who played a part in the annexation of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) by King Leopold II of Belgium. In addition, the museum has all sorts of detailed maps and geological data about central Africa in its possession.

Given the DRC’s large reserves of diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, coltan (used in mobile phones and laptop computers), zinc and manganese, this makes the museum a place of more than passing interest to mining executives, financial investors - and guests from booming economies in Asia.  

So after a routine tour of the stuffed animals, the Chinese visitors suggested to the museum staff that it would be a honour, a privilege, an unforgettable gesture of friendship, if they could be allowed to take a quick look at the maps and other specialised documentation not generally on public view. Of course, of course, came the reply. Why ever not?

So in they trooped into the vaults. Then the Chinese put in another request. Sorry to be a nuisance and all that, but would it be possible to take some copies of these materials?

What happened next is difficult to pin down. According to one version of events, the offer of a €20 banknote was enough for the Chinese to get their way. If so, it was - from a Chinese point of view - a brilliant and almost unbelievably, ridiculously cheap coup.

No need to send out geologists and surveyors to central Africa - it’s all been done for you a century ago! And no need to dip too deeply into China’s $1,682bn foreign exchange reserves! Inflation may be preying on everyone’s minds these days but, hey, €20 can get you a long way.

With apologies to France, whose eagerly awaited European Union presidency has not yet even started, it is tempting to cast one’s eyes forward and wonder what will happen when the Czech Republic begins its six-month spell in the driving seat next January.

The question is preoccupying more people in Brussels than you might think - starting with José Manuel Barroso. The European Commission president went to Prague last month and gave a rather curious speech in which he urged the Czechs to use their presidency “as an opportunity to engage with Europe”. You can’t imagine him needing to say something like that in Dublin, Rome or Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, which holds the EU presidency at the moment.

The problem is that the Czechs earned a reputation, soon after they and seven other countries joined the EU in 2004, as one of the most awkward and Eurosceptical of the new member-states.

Personally, I think it’s unfair. Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform think-tank makes the excellent point that Poland under the Kaczynski twins, and the Greek Cypriots under ex-president Tassos Papadopoulos, were much more prickly. I would add that the Czechs’ experiences as a small nation first in the Habsburg Empire, then at the hands of the Nazis after the British and French betrayal at Munich, and finally under Soviet domination, go a long way to explaining the Czech outlook on the world.

Still, there’s no doubt the Czechs have sometimes rubbed up their EU partners the wrong way. They have persistently brought up human rights violations in Cuba in a way that has exasperated those in Spain who feel Madrid knows best how to handle its former colony.

In President Vaclav Klaus, who openly opposed the EU’s constitutional treaty and who warns of the threats to national sovereignty posed by EU integration, the Czechs have a head of state who is as canny as the Good Soldier Svejk and as politically incorrect as a Brit.

So the worry in Brussels has been that, come next January, the Czechs’ alleged Euroscepticism would find expression in their leadership of the EU. They would, in short, spoil the party for everyone else.

Some of this concern is still around. The Czechs will be the first to hold the EU presidency in the new era launched by the Lisbon treaty, assuming it’s fully ratified by the end of December. They will therefore run the first “diminished presidency”, because from January the EU will have a semi-permanent president to chair summits and represent the EU abroad - you know, the job Tony Blair won’t get.

How to satisfy countries that will hold the rotating EU presidency, but won’t bask in the usual spotlight for six months, is extremely sensitive. It is bothering Sweden, which will assume the EU presidency in July 2009, as much as the Czechs.

But the good news is that the Czech government is already giving serious attention to its presidency. The bureaucratic machinery is in place and the policymakers are developing some interesting ideas. For example, the Czechs have suggested holding a summit of European energy consumers and suppliers to discuss energy security.

More broadly, the Czechs say the three core issues of their presidency will be “Competitiveness, the Four Freedoms [freedom of movement of people, goods, services and capital] and a Liberal Trade Policy”.

Not bad for a bunch of Eurosceptics, eh?