By Eoghan Dockrell
Is it fair that four million people can hold up half a billion? Is it right that the Irish electorate should vote on Lisbon again, after already rejecting it? Is Declan Ganley Satan’s brother? These contentious, provocative questions are a taste of what’s on offer if you’ve had time to listen in on the Lisbon debate. It’s widely accepted that this time the public are better informed on the Treaty. Then why is it that the powers that be continue to flood the referendum with catchy, but misleading one-liners?
The Yes side have slogans like “Yes to Europe, Yes to Lisbon” and “Yes to Jobs, Yes to Lisbon”. Basically, it’s yes to anything you like, once you pull the right lever on polling day. And on the other hand, the No side are being less ambiguous and a lot more direct with their apocalypse-style posters. One such batch of posters has a quote so terrifying that it would scare any part-time, minimum wage-earning, college student into jumping straight on the No-wagon without even questioning whether the statement is factual. For the hand full of people in the country who don’t know what I’m talking about; just type "1.84 Euro after Lisbon" into your computer and you’ll soon find out. The organisation behind this memorable, but wildly inaccurate, quote is Coir, a conservative pro-life group. The example above is just a sample of what kind of campaign they’re running.
But in spite of all these sharp, snappy campaign captions, polls consistently show that people are gravitating towards substance and in short, the catch-phrases are not sticking. It’s important to remember that at the time of the first Lisbon referendum our economy had not yet gone into free fall and most people were still treading water, working diligently, blissfully unaware of the crippling recession that lurked ahead. Now the environment has changed. The Lisbon Treaty has moved up in the public priority chart. As unemployment continues to rise, more and more people realise how critical it is for this country to make the right choice, whatever that may be.
Last time, perhaps we felt we could afford to let Ganley lead us astray and vote no, or give Taoiseach Cowen the benefit of the doubt for not reading the Treaty and vote yes. It’s evident talking with friends and family that the public have less and less patience for and trust in their public representatives. We need to hold them to higher standards and one way in which to do this is by better informing ourselves on matters of national importance. That’s why more citizens have put more time into finding out about Lisbon. This country is pulling out our collective laptops and collectively Googling "Lisbon Treaty". We’ve even began to read the campaign literature that arrives through our letter box, instead of just using it as compost in the back garden. This is progress.
It’s encouraging to sit on a bus and find yourself eavesdropping on two grannies who happen to be debating what Lisbon will mean for abortion. It’s encouraging to log on to Facebook and find more than a dozen comments that appear underneath a Lisbon related post (To all you Facebook cynics, this did actually happen). It’s not so encouraging watching a lady canvassing for a Yes vote get verbally bashed by anti-Lisbon (probably anti-everything), semi-drunk, drunk men.
Most people find it difficult to ignore the colourful and catchy phrases that swirl around the office and the classroom during a campaign season. Sometimes these simple phrases are the product of months of intense media testing and other times they seem to pop up out of thin air. But regardless of where they come from, they have a habit of sticking around and often end up greedily sucking up air-time and preventing people from discussing more weighty things. But in this referendum people seem to be educating themselves, concentrating more on substantive issues. The question is, can we continue to focus more on substance and less on misleading sound-bites? My answer is Yes We Can.
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