Am I the only person to have noticed that the proportion of the electorate who voted against the Nice Treaty was significantly smaller than in the case of the Amsterdam Treaty? Yes, I thought so!
The Amsterdam Treaty was voted upon on the same day as the Belfast Agreement, and 56 per cent of the electorate voted. Once they were in the polling stations to vote on that issue, all but 5 per cent of them also used their votes to give a verdict on the Amsterdam Treaty. Just under 40 per cent of these cast their votes against it, and that represented 21 per cent of the electorate.
But on June 7th last, unsurprisingly in the absence of any equivalent supplementary attraction, only 33 per cent of the electorate voted - and just over half of these, 18 per cent of the total electorate, voted against.
It is an absolute mystery to me that any politician should have found this outcome surprising, for it seemed to me self-evident that it would be difficult to get this treaty ratified in a referendum. Not impossible, perhaps, if the Government had launched and run an effective campaign to explain why the treaty should be approved and had answered effectively the objections of those who, having tasted blood in the Amsterdam Treaty referendum, were bound to make an even greater effort to defeat the Nice Treaty. But neither the Government nor indeed the Opposition parties, made any effort at such a campaign.
There is simply no point in complaining about the tactics of those campaigning against the Nice Treaty. The referendum was lost not because 18 per cent of the electorate were persuaded to vote against the treaty, but because the Government, and the other parties supporting the treaty, failed to convince even one-sixth of the electorate to come out to vote for it.
Had the Government been seriously concerned about the Nice Treaty, there were several things they might have done to persuade the people to ratify it.
The Government could have organised or encouraged meetings all around the State which could have been addressed not only by the Taoiseach and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, but also by other Ministers - almost all of whom seemed astonishingly silent during the campaign, although presumably they aren't all Eurosceptics.
Second, the Government party must surely have had the capacity to finance the printing and display of posters on at least an equal scale with the small fringe groups which put up No posters all over the State. Had Fianna Fail done that, I am sure that Fine Gael and Labour would have felt obliged to follow suit - not that these parties are to be excused for the inadequacies of their campaigns simply because Fianna Fail failed dismally to meet their responsibilities.
Third, the Government could have moved to offer some reassurance to public opinion on the neutrality issue, by hammering away at the fact that our existing legislation on the Defence Forces already precludes participation in peacekeeping actions by the Rapid Reaction Force not mandated by the UN and, if necessary, even strengthening the legislative ban on such engagement. Failure to address this issue seriously gave the antis a free run with their scare-mongering, body-bags and all.
As to the increased role of the President of the Commission and the extension of qualified majority voting to some new areas so as to limit the use of the veto, these Nice Treaty provisions actually reflect two of Ireland's principal vital interests in the Community, which for some curious reason the opponents of the treaty want to sabotage.
When we joined the European Community, we made it clear that we favoured extending the use of qualified majority voting, retaining the "veto" for only a small number of sensitive issues. The reason for this was that outside these few sensitive areas - which, of course, include tax harmonisation, the "veto" has tended to be abused by large countries pursuing their own interests, sometimes fairly ruthlessly, to the disadvantage of small countries like Ireland.
Moreover there are also fears now that with the enlargement of the Community, some maverick state might use this process to block progress that all the rest of us favour.
By contrast, in our experience of qualified majority voting, there has been almost no issue in respect of which any Irish interest has been even marginally adversely affected by such a vote.
As for the role of the President of the Commission, that body's exclusive power of initiating Community legislation represents our greatest protection against being bossed or bullied by larger states. Sustaining the Commission's role, and strengthening that of its President, have been seen by all Irish Governments as our most important single vital interest in the EU.
It is frankly astonishing that opponents of the Nice Treaty should have chosen to pick on these two key Irish interests as the key reasons for voting against the treaty.
If these facts had been consistently and authoritatively presented to the electorate by the Government a lot more than 15 per cent of the electorate would have voted to ratify the Nice Treaty.
The mountain that now has to be climbed in order to clear the way for the enlargement of the Community and to restore Ireland's reputation throughout Europe is very much higher than the small hill that the Government failed to tackle in the run-up to the referendum of June 7th.
And it hasn't been made any easier by Charlie McCreevy's Gothenburg Summit solo run, which undid much of the good work by the Taoiseach and Minister for Foreign Affairs as they sought to reassure both our partners and the applicant countries about our people's goodwill in relation to enlargement.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie