Ireland deals stunning blow to Europe

Irish voters have dealt a stunning blow to the European Union by decisively rejecting the bloc’s Lisbon treaty on institutional reforms, official results are expected to show on Friday.

The vote against Lisbon will plunge EU leaders into a crisis almost identical to that which gripped the 27-nation bloc when Dutch and French voters threw out a proposed EU constitutional treaty in 2005.

But some European politicians suggested that the latest crisis would be even worse, because it could tempt some EU member-states, frustrated with the lack of progress towards European political unity, to press ahead with closer integration on their own.

“There will arise a debate about a Europe of two speeds, a debate about those states that want deeper European integration and those that don’t,” predicted Martin Schulz, the German leader of the European Parliament’s socialist group.

Pro-Lisbon politicians in Dublin contested this argument and pointed out that Ireland belongs to the 15-nation eurozone, making it difficult to exclude it from core EU projects of economic integration.

EU leaders, who are due to hold a summit in Brussels next Thursday and Friday, are expected to react to the Irish No by reaffirming the need for all other EU member-states to ratify the treaty.

Eighteen countries have so far approved Lisbon in their parliaments, but the vote in Ireland – the only country to submit the treaty to a referendum – is sufficient to mean that the reforms contained in the document cannot come into effect.

These include the appointment of the EU’s first full-time president, a strengthened role for the EU’s foreign policy chief, increased powers for the European Parliament and national parliaments, a slimmed-down European Commission and a reform of the EU’s voting rules.

The Irish vote leaves the EU looking as if its ambitions to play a bigger role on the world stage are constantly being frustrated by its inability to reach a long-term settlement on its highly complicated internal arrangements.

The first response of EU leaders, while insisting that the ratification process in other countries must go ahead, will be to analyse the reasons why the Irish rejected Lisbon. Only later will they decide what steps are feasible to preserve the treaty’s reforms – or as many as politically possible.

One problem is that a second referendum in Ireland looks, at this stage, very difficult to justify. The turn-out was a respectable 52 to 53 per cent, higher even than the 49 per cent that endorsed the EU’s Nice treaty at a second attempt in Ireland in 2002.

“It’s up to the Irish, but I think the times are over when we can ask the people to vote again until they vote Yes,” Mr Schulz said.

The result was a kick in teeth for the Irish political and business establishment. All the main parties were united in support of a Yes vote and had the backing of big companies and small business associations alike.

Brian Cowen, who took over as premier last month, and ministers in his centre-right government blamed the outcome on “scare-mongering” by No campaigners who raised fears that the Lisbon treaty threatened Irish sovereignty and the Irish way of life on everything from taxation and neutrality to abortion and the use of hard drugs.

A spokesman for the nationalist opposition Sinn Féin party said that the pro-Lisbon forces in Ireland had missed the point by blaming their defeat on “scare-mongering”.

“Where is the humility? Where is the sense of them listening to the people’s concerns?” the Sinn Féin spokesman asked on Irish radio.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008