Brussels blog

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.