SURVEY OF NICE VOTE: The campaign for a Yes vote for the Nice Treaty was helped substantially by a sharp rise in support for European Union enlargement, a major analysis of the referendum has found.
The entry of Central and Eastern European countries, along with Cyprus and Malta was backed by 65 per cent after the campaign ended, compared with just 42 per cent after the first Nice referendum.
Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael supporters tended to vote in favour of ratification of the treaty, though supporters of the Labour Party were against.
The examination of the October referendum result, backed up by a poll carried out by Irish Marketing Surveys for the European Commission, was carried out by UCD professor Mr Richard Sinnott.
"No" voters were influenced by feelings that too many issues are decided by the EU and a belief that Ireland should do "all it can" to strengthen its neutrality.
The Government's information campaign successfully swayed some voters but the call for a Yes vote by the Irish Congress of Trades' Unions was less successful.
Despite the ICTU's efforts, voters who tend to trust trade unions were more inclined to vote No, while those favourable towards employers' bodies were more likely to vote Yes.
Fears that the Yes campaign would be affected by voters' post-election anger at the Government were found not to have been accurate.
Equally, efforts to raise immigration fears appear not to have been important, though 11 per cent of No voters gave this as their reason for rejecting the treaty.
Though political parties were able to mobilise their supporters to vote, they were less successful in actually determining their supporters' final voting decisions, Prof Sinnott found.
Despite the success of the Yes information campaigns, just two-in-five voters were still uninformed about the treaty's contents, while few are confident about their understanding of the EU itself.
Last night, the former leader of the Labour Party, Mr Ruairí Quinn, welcomed the survey, though he warned that some of its findings were contradictory.
"It demonstrates the need for a sustained information campaign throughout all the institutions of the State on an ongoing basis to inform the public about Europe," he told The Irish Times.
However, Green Party TD Mr John Gormley said the survey proved that voters voted Yes because they accepted the argument that enlargement would have been blocked otherwise. "The voters were not influenced by the Government's efforts to persuade them that neutrality was safeguarded, either by the Seville Declaration or by the clause added to the Irish Constitution."
Progressive Democrat chairman Senator John Minihan said the lessons learnt from the second Nice campaign would have to be applied during the public debate to come on the Convention on the Future of Europe. The convention needed to listen to what people wanted.
