The World

Ths time last year, I was about to head off to Brussels to an EU summit. The top item on the agenda was an effort to rescue the European Union constitution, after defeats in the French and Dutch referendums. The result was the document that became known as the Lisbon Treaty.Now I am about to head off to Brussels for another EU crisis summit – this time designed to rescue the Lisbon Treaty after its defeat in the Irish referendum.

These people never learn. But then that is why they can keep going. They are like the proverbial goldfish, endlessly circling their bowl – and constantly surprised and delighted by the view.

Last year, EU leaders seemed to have decided that the problem with the constitution was that it was far too easy to understand – and therefore frightening to the voters. As I wrote at the time, the Lisbon Treaty was a quite deliberate effort to obscure what was being done – and therefore to bore voters and parliaments into submission.

Now that the Irish have nonetheless rejected Lisbon, a new conventional wisdom is forming – the problem with the treaty is that it is too difficult to understand. Julian Gough, an Irish novelist, nicely captures the bafflement of the average Irish voter confronted with this monstrously dull document.

Attention will now turn to what kind of bribes and special protocols might be offered to the Irish to persuade them to change their minds. Most of the ideas doing the rounds are to do with guarantees about Irish sovereignty over defence or tax. But Gough has a better idea:

“My feeling, for what it’s worth, is that they should have put in a paragraph promising us all an icecream if we voted yes. At least that would have been something concrete that we could have visualised. It would have stood out a mile, for its clarity and lack of ambiguity, in the Irish Referendum Commission’s summary of the Treaty. And given that the weather was fairly good on the day of the vote, it might well have swung the referendum.”

Well, it must be worth a try. Nothing else has worked.