Thursday, October 1, 2009

The Lisbon Debate (/Debacle)

So here we are, on the eve of voting, at the Cowen-alleged end of the road.
The broadcasting moratorium is well in place, and polls close in seven hours.
And what a ludicrous road it's been.

In the blue corner, the Yes campaign, suppliers of wishy-washy "We belong" posters, buoyed by the yuppieish BESS poster children that seem to make up the bulk of Generation Yes and saddled with the dubious privilege of Michael O'Leary's support.
In the red corner, the No campaign, whose posters seem in the main to be churned out (and I do mean churned out) by Coir, purveyors of the fear-mongering, the petulant ("no means NO") and the downright offensive (apparently an eerily similar theme was used in campaigns opposing Ireland's joining the EEC in the early seventies- go figure) and whose recurrent figurehead is of course the incorrigible Declan Ganley. An unsettling figure at best, he raises numerous concerns for the Irish public, which can be boiled down pretty simply.

The mud-slinging motored through amusing to arrive at depressing fairly quickly, especially on round two, and offered no help to a nation blankly staring once again into the same clunking (and clunky) cement mixer, unsure whether it was more likely to smother our ailing island altogether or build us the famed "better europe".

By ten tonight the die will be cast in what has boiled down to what amounts to an eenie-meenie game of chance for a (probably unsettling) number of voters. The spectre of this telephone book-sized doorstop of a treaty seems about to lift at least partially from over Irish heads- it's out of our hands now, we're set to cry. The ball would appear to be moving to the Czech court.

Put on the popcorn.