Prof Richard Sinnott analyses the results of the two Nice referendums and the underlying state of public opinion they reveal.
The outcome of the second Nice referendum was indeed dramatic. The drama was heightened by the fact that, due to electronic voting in seven constituencies, the results from one-sixth of the electorate hit the airwaves in one ten-minute burst at about 11 o' clock on Saturday night.
Extrapolated to the rest of the country, those results pointed to a national Yes vote of 63 per cent and so it turned out to be. This represented an increase of some 17 percentage points for the Yes side, an increase that might seem to be sufficient to permit the result of the first Nice referendum to be regarded as an aberration.
If Nice had been a one-off change to the treaties governing the EU, one could perhaps leave it at that, or at least leave it to the psephologists or electoral analysts to pore over the details and let everyone else get on with enlargement.
However, the nature of the EU is such that we will all be back on this particular track again, and the activities of the Convention on the Future of Europe will ensure that this will happen sooner rather than later. Accordingly, while allowing the Yes side to savour their success and without detracting in any way from the impact at home and abroad of an impressive 63 per cent majority, it may be as well to begin the process of analysing what happened and why.
The what is best considered not by looking at the outcome (i.e. the 63 Yes to 37 No) but at the results as a proportion of the electorate.
This shows that two things changed and one thing did not. First, turnout jumped (from 35 to 49 per cent). Or, to put it the other way around, instead of two out of every three electors abstaining, only one in every two abstained.
The second thing to change was that the Yes vote jumped by 15 points or by almost the exact same amount as the increase in turnout. The thing that did not change was the level of the No vote, which was 18.5 per cent of the electorate in 2001 and 18.3 per cent in this referendum. While these figures undoubtedly mask some cancelling-out movement from Yes to No and vice versa, the larger picture they suggest is a valid overall approximation. In the main, what happened was that the No vote stagnated, while the Yes side gained hugely from the increase in turnout. This confirms the analysis of the first Nice referendum which suggested that ratification failed on that occasion because so many former or potential Yes voters stayed at home. In this sense the Government and the Yes side had learned the lesson of June 2001 and must be pleased with the results of their campaigning efforts this time. The success of their campaign is confirmed by the evidence of the Irish Times/MRBI series of polls which shows that the electorate's confidence in its overall grasp of the issues raised by the Nice Treaty went from 37 per cent at the beginning of the Nice I campaign to 47 per cent at the end of that first campaign, to 53 per cent at the beginning of the Nice II campaign and to 64 per cent a few days before the vote.
It is also confirmed by the evidence in the last of that series of polls that showed Yes voters indicating a wide range of reasons for their decision.
Government and Yes campaigners would, however, also do well to attend to the issues that exercised the No voters.
Principal among these, according to the Irish Times/MRBI and other polls, were neutrality, economic insecurity, immigration and, finally, a more intangible sense of potential loss of power and identity.
In the normal course of events, with European treaty changes only arising every five years or so, the Government (and the electorate) would expect to set these and other EU issues to one side and get back to normal politics. For three reasons, this is not an option. The first is that another referendum is already on the horizon.
The second is that preparation for EU referendums requires two kinds of campaigns - a long campaign of information and education and a short campaign of argument and persuasion.
The third reason is that "domestic" politics are no longer really separable from European politics. The proposed reforms in the way the Oireachtas deals with EU affairs is both a recognition of this and a way of dealing with the implications.
In the course of the campaign just concluded, the opinion polls told a remarkably consistent story. In fact that story was pretty consistent across both campaigns. Fundamentally, it was that somewhat over 40 per cent of people were inclined to vote Yes, a little over a quarter were inclined to vote No and one third were "don't knows" or non-voters, mostly the former.
If, back in June 2001, one had taken these figures, eliminated the don't knows and non-voters and recalculated the percentages, one would have got a radically wrong answer.
In the referendum just concluded, the very same procedure would have given a very good approximation to the result.
It is not that the polls were right on one occasion and wrong on the other.
The fact is that on both occasions they pointed to the same underlying reality.
This is that there is a potential or latent majority in Irish public opinion in favour of European integration.
What the different outcomes of June 7th, 2001 and October 19th, 2002 show is that mobilising that majority requires a lot of effort, a lot of information and a lot of persuasion. In short, it cannot be taken for granted.
Professor Richard Sinnott is director of the Public Opinion and Political Behaviour research programme at the Institute for the Study of Social Change in UCD.