A reasonable set of answers to some questions would have seen the treaty Yes campaign coast home, writes Fintan O'Toole.
POLITICAL POSTERS are generally a pointless nuisance, but this time they are oddly eloquent. The other day I passed two lamp posts in succession. One was adorned with two No slogans: "Say No To Foreign Rule" and "Follow the French and Dutch - Vote No".
While I was still chuckling at that perfect microcosm of the No campaign's ability to appeal simultaneously to precisely opposite instincts, the next lamp post wiped the smile off my face. Here was one of the posters typical of the Yes campaigns of the three largest parties - the face of a local politician telling us, in effect, to trust our political leaders. In this case, the local TD on the poster was a man called Bertie Ahern. The poster's only message was that we should trust him when he tells us that Lisbon is good for Ireland and for Europe. After all, he wouldn't lie to us, would he?
If the referendum is lost on Thursday, or if, as I suspect, the Yes side squeaks to the narrowest and most grudging of victories, it will be because the bulk of the political class has no idea how damaged it is. The astonishing smugness of expecting to win a complex argument by putting the faces of party leaders, TDs and even councillors on lamp posts and assuming that we will be overcome by a spontaneous outpouring of absolute confidence will have been exposed.
Voters, reasonably enough, set the bar much higher for a Yes vote than for a No. Our reasons for doing something have to be clear - those for not doing something can be confused, incoherent, self-contradictory. The No campaign has undoubtedly embodied this truth is spectacular style. Lisbon is too heavily weighted towards business interests and is not sufficiently pro-business. It is a plot to involve us in Nato and, as the uber-hawk John Bolton told us at the weekend, it would undercut the military ties between the US and Europe. Lay the Trotskyites, right-wing Catholics, nationalists, internationalists, anti-militarists, people with ties to the US military, free market anti-regulation ideologists and trade unions who want more regulation end to end and they'd never reach a conclusion.
Don't even try to imagine a post-Lisbon Plan C that would appease all of these groups - that way madness lies.
But for the No campaign this radical incoherence is a massive strength. The bigger and more varied the smorgasbord of negativity, the easier it is for each voter to find a palatable dish. For the Yes campaign on the other hand, the task is very different. It is to construct a credible and coherent narrative. The question it has really had to answer is "what's next?" What happens, to Ireland and to Europe, if the Lisbon Treaty is passed? Brian Cowen hasn't even begun to answer that question or to show that he understands the credibility gap across which he has to speak.
The whole "trust us" strategy was based on a belief that the fall of Bertie Ahern was just an unfortunate accident, a personal mess with no wider consequences. But there is a real price to be paid for the fundamental abuse of trust involved both in Ahern's original behaviour and in his increasingly bizarre explanations. When people are laughing at the man who ran the country for over a decade, when his successor and most of his senior colleagues have disgraced themselves by defending the indefensible and smearing the tribunal, the basis for democratic politics is corroded.
In the absence of trust, coherence is all the more crucial. The details of Lisbon matter much less to voters than the question of how it fits into a vision of the foreseeable future. What's the world going to look like in 10 or 20 years' time? What's Europe's place in that world? What's Ireland's place in that Europe? What values will we bring to bear on the choices we have to make? A reasonable set of answers to those questions would have seen the Yes campaign coast home.
But here again, there is a deadly absence. The short-term, populist politics of the last 15 years - the catch-all, whatever you're having yourself approach so brilliantly perfected by Bertie Ahern - has consequences no less harmful to the Yes campaign than the smug decision to appeal to a long-lost trust. We are led by people who can't achieve modest medium-term goals, let alone articulate long-term visions. It is no accident that the Irish Timespoll shows support for Lisbon to be particularly weak among working-class voters, who have most reason to fear the consequences of unchecked globalisation and who most need to hear that the Government has a strategy to protect them.
The ideological vacuum created by pragmatic populism has been filled from all directions by the No campaign. On the simple criterion of who has set the agenda and hit the right nerves, the No side deserves to win and the Government deserves to lose.
Whether Ireland - and Europe - deserves to pay such a high price for the moral pettiness of our local leaders is, of course, a whole other question.