EU MEETING:TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen has told his EU counterparts the Government is doing all it can to persuade voters to back the Lisbon Treaty.
At an informal summit of EU leaders in Brussels last night, Mr Cowen said the campaign was going well so far, but a Yes vote was not yet assured.
“The campaign is continuing, and the trend so far has been helpful, but there are still two weeks to campaign and anything can happen in a referendum campaign,” he told journalists as he arrived for the summit.
“There is a very determined effort on behalf of everybody on the Yes side to get out and make sure people understand and see we are stronger with Europe. The scale of the problems we face require us to work with partners and people with like-minded values and policies.”
The Irish referendum was not on the formal agenda of the summit, which was called to prepare a common EU position ahead of next week’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh, US. However, before the meeting some EU leaders, including British prime minister Gordon Brown, said they hoped for a Yes vote.
“We have yet to have the Irish referendum and yet to see all countries sign up to the treaty. But we hope we will get that in the next few weeks,” said Mr Brown when asked about the treaty and new EU jobs it would create.
Mr Cowen warned about the potential negative consequences of a No vote on October 2nd.
“From our point of view we’ve been very happy with the policies pursued by the ECB. They have been extremely helpful in terms of liquidity support to our banking system. I think it is very clear to people in Ireland that there are consequences to all of our political decisions and the context of the decision that is being taken has changed.”
He said Nama, a Yes vote on the Lisbon Treaty and the budget were “all inter-related and are all part of charting a direction towards economic recovery”.
Asked about foreign interference in the referendum campaign from groups such as UKIP, Mr Cowen said: “I don’t engage in any sort of real conversation with people with whom I fundamentally disagree.”
In an interview published in the Timesnewspaper in London yesterday, Libertas leader Declan Ganley compared his tactics in the referendum campaign to those in the film Braveheart.
“This is an asymmetric fight. We are skint. The thing about Brussels and their Yes men is that they have vast and overwhelming forces and they just keep revisiting our line.
“We can’t fight a conventional ground war against these people because we will lose. So this was not by accident to wait to the day we did.
"It's like that scene in Braveheartwith the lads with the sharpened staves and the English heavy cavalry charging. And I was basically saying 'wait, wait, wait' and then at the last minute you pull up the big 12-foot-long sharpened staves and you impale the bastards on their own argument."