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.”

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”.