What message were you trying to send? [Not "why did you vote No?"]

vibe666

unfortunately I didn't get to vote, I'm not an Irish citizen although I've been living and working here 7 years now with an Irish partner.

I have no political preconceptions or any strong feelings about keeping Ireland's perceived independence within Europe.

If I'd been asked to vote it would have been a YES and I'm sad that it looks like the NO vote seems to have won the day because I do feel strongly that the way forward for Ireland is to be at the forefront of Europe and I think that has been severely compromised by what's happened today.

One of the 'NO' points seemed to be that they wanted everything to stay the same, or at least not to change in the way that a YES vote would change things, but I think we will see over time that that isn't the case.

Billions of euro have been invested in ensuring that the Lisbon treaty is/was ratified and now that looks like it might have been scuppered by what accounts for less than 1% of the population of Europe. You don't think that's going to have an effect on the country?

Look at the billions of euro already pumped into Ireland over the last number of years for infrastructure etc. that led to things like the government having enough financial leeway to have enough revenue to make huge tax cuts to entice businesses here and start off the celtic tiger economy boom.

where would Ireland be now without all that investment? more importantly, where will Ireland be on the list when they're handing out all these grants and extra funding for these sorts of projects in the future?

with the amount of money that has flowed through the dail in the last few years Ireland should be at the forefront of healthcare, infrastructure, technology, education and jobs etc. but when you look at it, even with all that money coming in it's pretty much a shambles. How well do you think it's going to go if there's an economic downturn and we don't have the EU to prop the country up financially?

right, now I'm going to totally contractict myself now, so I'll point it out myself to avoid some smartar$e doing it for me.

yes the government is a shower of feckless eejits, but they are our democratically elected shower of eejits that were voted into power to make complex political decisions for us because lets face it, we can't really be trusted to make all these decisions ourselves.

BUT, when you look at it, (the final vote seems to be in now) and it looks like 3.4% of the people who actually voted made it a NO. Anyone know how many people that actually is?

sorry my maths is terrible, but either way 3.4% in the difference is hardly a landslide victory, it's almost split down the middle really.

so what it comes down to is a tiny zero point something percent of half a billion people just made a decision that may seriously affect all of them. that's quite a big burden.

on a lighter related note, did anyone else see the pic on the front page of www.ireland.com?

I wonder how long that photographer waited there to catch dick roche perfectly framed with a big NO sign in front of him.



P.S. what happened to the image tags?

EDIT: the final count is on the BBC news site:

The Irish No campaign won by 862,415 votes to 752,451. Turnout was 53.1%.

so 109,964 people made the difference. if 54,982 had voted YES instead of NO, it would have gone through.

it's actually quite an interesting article with quite a few snippets in there.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7453560.stm

LOL, i bet everys fecked off down the pub now anyway and forgotten about it all already.

FrankGrimes

FrankGrimes wrote: »

I find it surprising that so few No voters have actually answered what was a pretty simple question by the OP.

Forget why you voted no, what message do you want to send to the EU? Was your intention:

1. To give a message to our own government that you don't trust/support them.

2. To tell the EU that you are perfectly happy with the status quo and don't want anything to change.

3. To tell the EU that you're not happy with Ireland's involvement in the EU and want to reduce Ireland's involvement.

4. To tell the EU that you're not happy with Ireland's current involvement in the EU and want a different treaty that will address whatever specific concerns you may have and you would then be happy to back such a treaty to continue Ireland's involvement.

5. No message, you just heard some things from the No campaign that you didn't like the sound of and voted No on the basis of that but have no strong opinion on Europe beyond that.

6. None of the above - please clarify if so.

This is not intended to question or undermine anybody's decision, I'm just finding it hard to understand why people voted No. I fully respect peoples' right to vote No and also to not reply here, but the No campaigners have always said they support the EU just not this treaty, so I'm trying to understand in what way they support the EU and what could have been different about this treaty to address those needs.

As I've said elsewhere, my personal feeling is that a lot of No voters voted that way due to being misinformed or mislead on the contents of the treaty, but I'm sure that only applies to a portion of No voters, so I'd simply like to understand the motives of those No voters that were well informed.

Not sure how this can be construed as arrogance - it's just an attempt to better understand things, especially since no No campaigners said they were saying No just cos they don't like the idea of Ireland being involved in the EU, so in the absence of the above explanation, something is not adding up for me, so I'd appreciate some input from No voters to help me fill in the gaps.

Again, I'm still highly surprised at the low number of clear responses from No voters to the OP's question (i.e. the focus of this thread). I think a lot of this discussion is going off-topic for this thread. I happen to agree that the Yes campaign was handled in a very patronising and condescending manner, but that's not the point.

The question is for those of you who voted No, what message do you want to give our government and/or the EU?

At a certain point, a lack of clear responses as this would lead me to the conclusion that the lack of responses is due to people not being confident in how their reasoning for voting No will stand up to scrutiny. My particular interest here is to find out how the No campaign can say they are not anti-EU, they are just anti-Lisbon treaty, but I haven't seen much by way of 'I'm anti-Lisbon due to XYZ, but if the EU were to do AB and C, I'd vote for it'. For example, Sinn Fein say they are not anti-EU, but their record of being against every single EU referendum doesn't stack up, so are they just saying they are not anti-EU to avoid isolating some voters, or is there something I'm missing?

Everyone is of course entitled to vote whichever way they choose and do not have to justify it to anyone...I'm just asking for this insight to help me understand the mindset of the No voter a bit better.

Phototoxin

The question is for those of you who voted No, what message do you want to give our government and/or the EU?

that NO we DO NOT agree to the proposed treaty.

why is that so hard to understand ?

Sparks

FrankGrimes wrote: »

Again, I'm still highly surprised at the low number of clear responses from No voters to the OP's question

Those of us who answered got lost in the noise.

Biro

FrankGrimes wrote: »

The question is for those of you who voted No, what message do you want to give our government and/or the EU?

Actually the question was "What message were you trying to send to the EU".
To me, that's a snide way of implying that voting No is sending out a major anti-Europe message but asking us what our small minds were thinking when we voted No.
Your question above is a fair one. The one in Post 1 in this thread is not.

vibe666

i think the government made a bit of a clusterfvck of the whole 'explaining' thing.

a lot of the YES camp have been sayng that the information is all there for those people interested in reading it, but a significant portion of the NO's voted no because they didn't think the government explained it properly.

This isn't a new stance though, the whole Nice/Nice2 farce went exactly the same way. it wasn't like the government couldn't have anticipated it.

okay so there was a few leaflets through the door, but not a huge amount else other than a few recycled political posters from the election.

talking of which, where were the political 'troops' on the ground?

all around election time we were getting loads of knocks on doors from various people but now with something as important as this and people shouting out against a lack of information they're nowhere to be seen.

all it would have taken would have been some well educated door to door Q&A sessions and it would have been in the bag.

54,982 votes short of a win.

well done Mr Cowen. :rolleyes:

P.S. is that ol' rolleyes back or is my browser loading an old cached image again?

Sparks

54,982 votes short of a win. well done Mr Cowen.

Y'know, it wasn't a game. And there was no "winning side". We got asked to vote and we did - the only thing you could call a win here is that we decided by voting instead of by shooting one another until those left standing were all in agreement...

FrankGrimes

Surely you can articulate a little bit more than that Phototoxin?

I would have thought it's pretty clear that someone voting No does not agree to the proposed treaty. The question is WHY do you not agree with the proposed treaty?

I don't believe that anybody simply has an opinion of 'I do not agree with the proposed treaty'....I think people voting no have an opinion of 'I do not agree with the proposed treaty because.....XYZ' and it is the reasoning behind that decision I am trying to understand (which has been mad more difficult by people such as yourself avoiding what is a simple qeustion).

Is it a case of 'I do not support the treaty for some specific reasons that if addressed would lead to me supporting the treaty' or 'I do not support the EU regardless of the content of the treaty', or any other of the many reasons there may be (some suggestions of which I have called out in my thread).

Sparks

Surely you can articulate a little bit more than that Phototoxin?

To be fair, that's the only expression allowed by the referendum. I can't see why anyone should be obligated to justify their choice.

In/Casino/Out

whitser wrote: »

if they didnt understand it then why should they vote for it. cowon himself didnt read it. most people had a general understanding of it and rejected it. i think people just dont like the direction the eu is going and they've voted with their feet,as the man says.

If you don't understand you should abstain. Cowen himself didn't read it because it's an amended treaty and he would have been involved in writing the whole thing. If your trying to suggest that our leader would blindly agree to an international treaty without understanding it, well that just makes no sense.
People don't like the way the EU is going? Most people didn't have a bloody clue about any of the inner workings of the EU untill misleading, scaremongering propaganda came out. I know I didn't.

FrankGrimes

Thanks for the clarification Biro. I'm glad you agree there is nothing snide in my question - I feel people don't make decisions on things like this (or divorce, abortion, general elections) in complete isolation from preferences they may have, so I'm just trying to understand what the reasoning of some No voters was, and more particularly, what they would like to see happen next.

Sparks - I agree that this was not a game and there was no winners or losers, but the behaviour of several groups of No supporters I have heard on the radio today (shouting down the radio presenter on numerous occassions) was regrettable. Though in fairness, the chants of 2 Unlimited's No Limits (No No, No no no no....) were pretty damn good!

Sparks

If you don't understand it, you should learn more about it. If you *still* can't understand it, odds are it's badly written and ought to be rejected on that basis alone (we've seen enough examples of the downsides of poorly written laws domestically after all).
In reality, it wasn't that hard to understand. And as I said above, 90% or so of what was in it was right. It's just that you can't do this "ask and ask again" sort of thing for something like the EU. Either we all agree and go in together, or we go back and work out something we can all agree to. Or we start lobbing 40mm shells at each other, but I tend to regard that as a failure mode.

Sparks

FrankGrimes wrote: »

Sparks - I agree that this was not a game and there was no winners or losers, but the behaviour of several groups of No supporters I have heard on the radio today (shouting down the radio presenter on numerous occassions) was regrettable. Though in fairness, the chants of 2 Unlimited's No Limits (No No, No no no no....) were pretty damn good!

Meh. It's not what I'd do, and it's not much fun to watch, but I've seen far worse in Dail Eireann debates and like Dev said, you get jostled more trying to get in a round at closing time in the bar.

FrankGrimes

Sparks wrote: »

To be fair, that's the only expression allowed by the referendum. I can't see why anyone should be obligated to justify their choice.

Of course noone is obligated to justify their choice. However, this is a thread on a discussion forum with a stated goal of understanding the reasoning behind voting No, so those opting in on this thread under the privacy afforded by usernames should not be surprised to be asked for such reasoning (justification not required).

Sparks

I'm not saying they can't! I'm just saying that it makes no sense to demand it from anyone.

VoidStarNull

Lads, we should settle this issue with a poll.

I voted NO because:

A. I didn't understand it
B. I don't want to be conscripted into an EU army
C. I don't want abortion in Ireland
D. I want to keep our veto on corporate taxes
E. Other

cornbb

Thread title edited to reflect the question I'm asking, not "why did you vote no?", which is not the question I asked.

Here is my question, again.

Still no sign of an answer.

cornbb wrote: »

What message were you trying to send to the EU?

The no campaigners claimed that rejecting the treaty would enable us to send the government back to the negotiating table with "a clear message that we want a better deal for Ireland".

My question is, what is the clear message? How do you propose we get a better deal?

turgon

The message I want to send to Europe, well...

I want no EU army. I want no common defense. Why do so many every man made organizations find some reason to bring guns into the issue?

I want a real shakeup of democracy in Europe, not like some half arced attempts in Lisbon (such as the Citizens Initiative) designed only for us to say yes. Real movement towards a full democracy.

Further to this I want the accountability of the EU UP UP UP.

I want the snaky dealings to go. By this I mean the way in which French and Dutch voters said No to constitution - that we thought would be the end of it, but now they have ratified 90% of it. The excuse that ratification is not an EU issue just those not float. The way in which individual nations deal with European issues reflects on the EU as a whole.

Included in the above is the structure of the Lisbon Treaty - specifically designed to make it hard to understand. What was that quote again - "people will be made to adopt the measures thy would not agree to normally"??

oscarBravo

Sparks wrote: »

To be fair, that's the only expression allowed by the referendum. I can't see why anyone should be obligated to justify their choice.

Who's asking for a justification?

The question is, what is it that the "no" voters want? If they want the status quo, they're going to be sorely disappointed.

There has been a lot of bluster about how the EU is going to have to sit up and pay attention to us. Congratulations, we've made a big fuss, like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Now that the tantrum is over, what is it that we want? It's become clear that the answer is: we don't know. We just wanted to throw a tantrum.

cornbb

oscarBravo wrote: »

Who's asking for a justification?

The question is, what is it that the "no" voters want? If they want the status quo, they're going to be sorely disappointed.

There has been a lot of bluster about how the EU is going to have to sit up and pay attention to us. Congratulations, we've made a big fuss, like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Now that the tantrum is over, what is it that we want? It's become clear that the answer is: we don't know. We just wanted to throw a tantrum.

This is the point I've been trying to make. There is no "list of demands", there is no "better deal".

Sparks

I wasn't thinking of it as message-sending to be honest. If I want to send a message to a government, I write/email/talk to my local TD, the relevant Minister, the Taoiseach, whomever is relevant. A single bit of information (as in one eight of a byte, not as in one chunk) is insufficient to pass on any message.

Sparks

oscar, corn, that's not a question worth answering, it's just abuse in a nice wrapper.

uptherebels

turgon wrote: »

The message I want to send to Europe, well...

I want no EU army. I want no common defense. Why do so many every man made organizations find some reason to bring guns into the issue?

I want a real shakeup of democracy in Europe, not like some half arced attempts in Lisbon (such as the Citizens Initiative) designed only for us to say yes. Real movement towards a full democracy.

Further to this I want the accountability of the EU UP UP UP.

I want the snaky dealings to go. By this I mean the way in which French and Dutch voters said No to constitution - that we thought would be the end of it, but now they have ratified 90% of it. The excuse that ratification is not an EU issue just those not float. The way in which individual nations deal with European issues reflects on the EU as a whole.

Included in the above is the structure of the Lisbon Treaty - specifically designed to make it hard to understand. What was that quote again - "people will be made to adopt the measures thy would not agree to normally"??

that fairly sums it up

cornbb

Sparks wrote: »

oscar, corn, that's not a question worth answering, it's just abuse in a nice wrapper.

Its a question of vital national importance. We voted no, now the ball is in Ireland's court. What do we say to them when biffo meets the other EU leaders next week? They will ask us what we want. Are we just going to say "go back to the drawing board!" with no real solid qualification or explanation? That is the question I'm asking here.

decoder

What I am shocked about is the amount of people who instead of looking into the treaty and making even a slight effort to decipher it, chose to vote no because 'they didn't understand'. A lot of people made no effort to understand, and hence chosing no was the easier option. I accept that a lot of people who voted no did so based on their concerns, but i think a significant amount of people did so out of ignorance.

I think the yes campaign ran an uninformative campaign and had they footnoted the benefits of the treaty the way Prionsias de Rossa did in yesterday's metro (25 reasons to vote yes, all supported by treaty reference) we might have had a different result. On the other hand the no campaign incorporated scare mongering and schoolyard tactics to steer people away from the positive aspects of the Lisbon treaty.

Its a sad day for a country that has done so well out of the EU. The message we are sending is an ungrateful one. I am interested now to see just how our '2030 Vision' will be implemented when were at the bottom of the list for EU structural funding.

oscarBravo

Sparks wrote: »

oscar, corn, that's not a question worth answering, it's just abuse in a nice wrapper.

It's convenient to dismiss it that way, sure.

But it misses the fundamental point: exactly what the hell are we supposed to do now?

Some people are trying to push the bizarre idea that somehow this "no" vote has given a mandate to the government to go and get something. It has done nothing of the sort. This thread illustrates pretty clearly that there is no coherent reason for an objection to Lisbon; nothing whatsoever that the government can take back to the EU and say "look lads, here's the problem."

I'm aware that many on the "no" side will say that such is not their problem, it's the government's. This is precisely the point I made a few days ago: those who were supporting a "no" vote have absolutely nothing to lose by so doing. They've campaigned vigorously for something that they can walk away from and say to someone else, "we've made a mess, now you clean it up."

monroe

I support the idea of running a poll on this thread because I'm getting a bit tired of hearing that the majority of people voted No because they essentially couldn't get their heads around the key issues!

I voted no because, from what I read, it offered EU law supremecy over our constitution, and unlike during the election, I didnt receive one politician on my doorstep to whom I could have queried this point with. (and as someone who helped one of the parties campaign during the election, Im pretty surprised by this)

I also rejected it because the French and Dutch people voted against this treaty in its other, similar, yet differently worded format. We should not have been the only country to have had the right to vote.

Accept the word of the voters, if it comes back at us, I trust the electorate to examine it with the same level of intelligence. Its frankly a cop out to say so many people were scaremongered into it with talk of abortion, armies, and some of the other garbage that was thrown around. Some of us made our minds up solely on the treaty that was offered to us.

Very proud to be Irish and European today

turgon

decoder wrote: »

Its a sad day for a country that has done so well out of the EU. The message we are sending is an ungrateful one. I am interested now to see just how our '2030 Vision' will be implemented when were at the bottom of the list for EU structural funding.

Decoder seems to be implying that we should take whatever Europe throws at us based on the success of the economy.

turgon

And all of ye are complaining theres been no reasons from the No side, I gave mine and no one has made any comment.

oscarBravo

monroe wrote: »

I voted no because, from what I read, it offered EU law supremecy over our constitution...

...which has been the case since 1973.

Going back to the core question of this thread: what do you think Ireland should do? Demand that we be exempted from a core principle of the EU that we've been happily signed up to for 35 years?