Social Media Ninjas and the Eighth Amendment

The Eighth Amendment Committee

The Times Ireland edition led yesterday with a story about an (unnamed) Irish anti-abortion campaign group that has hired a company called Kanto to handle the digital side of things once the campaigning starts.

Kanto was founded by one Thomas Borwick, who describes himself as the Chief Technology Officer of the Vote Leave Brexit campaign, and the story goes on to speculate that, because of the tactics used in the Brexit campaign, the hiring of Kanto and Mr Borwick “will raise fears about the Eighth Amendment referendum.”

Maybe. Maybe not.

The definitive book of the Brexit campaign is All-Out War, written by Tim Shipman, chief political correspondent of the Times’s sister paper, the Sunday Times. It’s 662 pages of small type in paperback, 26 of which are a fairly comprehensive index. Neither Thomas Borwick nor Kanto are mentioned anywhere in those 26 pages.

In the index section dealing with Vote Leave, we are directed to ‘and digital campaign, 414-19, 421, 424-25, 464.’ Thomas Borwick isn’t mentioned there either.

Shipman identifies Vote Leave’s digital campaign as a key part of the shock victory. On pages 414 to 419 of his very readable book, Shipman identifies the key players – Henry de Zoete, digital director. Zack Massingham, of a Canadian social media company called AggregateIQ.

And there were three astrophysicists from the west coast of the USA who were brought in to crunch numbers in the same manner Wall Street hired physicists to construct models to persuade people to invest in subprime mortgages before August, 2008. We can’t be sure, but it’s unlikely that Thomas Borwick was one of those astrophysicists.

A quick Google revealed some, but not very many, references to Borwick as CTO of Vote Leave, most notably a piece by Carol Cadwalladr in the Guardian. And the man himself is not sparing in singing his own praises on his LinkedIn page with regard to his work with Vote Leave: “I have gone through the process of everything from wire framing websites to daily scrum meetings and planning our central database system for 43 million voters and maintaining an 80 user computer system.”

Just below the Experience section in LinkedIn, as the great world knows, is the Skills section. The specific computer skills Borwick lists are Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel and HTML. Quite a modest list for the Chief Technology Officer of a system sitting on a 43-million-row database that was used to create the biggest political upheaval in Great Britain since the Glorious Revolution of 1689.

Your correspondent has no fears for Thomas Borwick’s PR career. Borwick’s father is Jamie Borwick, 5th Baron Borwick, and his mother, Victoria Lorne Peta Borwick, Baroness Borwick, is a former Deputy Mayor of London and MP for Kensington. The family have a coat of arms – three bears’ heads, a row of three eight-pointed-stars, all on a white background. One imagines even the haughty Lannisters sitting up and taking notice.

What this means is the man has contacts. If you hire Kanto, you get access right into the ventricles of the beating heart of the British establishment. What you may be less likely to get is the sort of computer savant that the unnamed Irish anti-abortion group may be expecting. Whoever that anti-abortion group is, it is to be hoped they kept the receipt.

On Referendums

The 'eighties, man.

RTÉ are guilty of some sloppy reporting of Ms Mary Laffoy’s remarks at the opening of the latest meeting of the Citizens’ Assembly in Malahide on Saturday last. RTÉ tell us that “Ms Mary Laffoy told the members that the holding of referendums is a fundamental part of democracy,” but what MsLaffoy actually said was “The holding of a referendum is a fundamental component of our democracy.”

The “our” is important. They never hold referendums in the USA. They hold them all the time in Switzerland. They are held very rarely in the United Kingdom and, after the unmitigated disaster of the last one, they will think long and hard before calling the next.

Ireland holds referendums to change the constitution because the constitution dictates that it can only be changed through referendum. The current constitution succeeded the Free State Constitution in 1937. The Free State constitution was changed by act of parliament, as the US constitution is. This is what happened to the infamous Oath of Allegiance – De Valera and Fianna Fáil dumped it in jig time, and quickly took apart other provisions of that Free State constitution that they found equally objectionable.

There then being nothing left but the bones, Fianna wrote up a new constitution which was accepted by the people in 1937. Eighty years ago, and counting.

There were fourteen referendums held in the first fifty years of the Constitution, of which ten passed and four failed. There were twenty-five more amendments passed in the next thirty years, and more failed referendums than your correspondent could be bothered counting (the numbering on Wikipedia seems a little inconsistent).

As European integration continues referendums will be needed more often and will be less and less suited to changing the constitution. Referendums are suited to broad-stroke topics, rather than Brusselspeak. The legalese will be too subtle to be suited to a referendum debate and vote, and it is the nature of referendums that when people are in doubt, they will vote no to be on the safe side.

The idea of representative democracy is that the people shouldn’t have to wade through this sort of legalise to make decisions. The sovereign people elect representatives to carry out their wishes, and its those elected representatives that are to do the wading through the legal thickets. If the people dislike how their representatives do that wading, they elect some other representatives. Representative democracy.

However. The nation is now lumbered with a series of problems when it comes to referendums. The first problem is that the Ireland of 2017 is starkly different to the Ireland of 1937 and the constitution is no longer suited to the governance of the country. Ireland needs a new constitution.

The second problem is that while the population is better educated in such things as skills and diet, we are less educated as regards civics, public standards, public behaviour and the very definition of nationhood. This is part of a general western malaise of course, but a small country like ours should have been better able to hold its public representatives to account.

Whatever the reasons, the fact is that if a new constitution were written by a joint committee of Pericles of Athens, Thomas Jefferson of the United States and Cú Chulainn, the Hound of Ulster, it still wouldn’t get passed because a combination of cranks, demagogues, ne’er-do-wells and out-and-out fools would get together to find a fault, any fault, and persuade a scared and gullible electorate to take no chances boys, take no chances, you wouldn’t know what they’d be up to. Don’t take a chance!

The third problem is that the current crop of public representatives are rather in love with the idea of referendums, as it means they don’t have to take responsibility for what they were elected to do. Taking responsibility is about the last thing they want to do.

A craven reaction to the Abortion referendum is only to be expected, of course. But the twenty members of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Funding of Domestic Water Charges voted unanimously – unanimously! – in favour of a referendum on the ownership of the nation’s waterten months ago. There were usual suspects on that committee but there were also politicians there who aspire to governing the country, and who should hang their heads in shame. By whom I mean Barry Cowen, Alan Farrell, Kate O’Connell, Willie O’Dea, Lorraine Clifford-Lee and maybe one or two others. The full membership is here.

The chances of any government addressing this referendum issue and the datedness of the constitution are, of course, extremely slim. They’re quite content with this piecemeal, heads-down, rock-no-boat agenda while the European super-state is being built and Ireland is left out. Until the day comes when the Taoiseach of the day is called to Brussels and told there isn’t going to be an Irish constitution any more.

He or she will be told that the country’s economy has crashed four times and being bailed out three, and no matter how often you’re told you’re told that your insistence on seeing houses as capital assets, your limiting of access to justice to those who can pay and your inability to police the country is scandalous, shameful and a bridge too far, the penny just won’t drop. We’re sorry Paddy, but we’re taking the keys of the car. You’ll be much safer with us to mind you.

But, of course, it will be too late to cry about it then. The British are ninety-five years gone. We have no-one to blame but ourselves.

Seanad Dodges Bullet, State Remains Critical

Abolishing the Seanad should have been as easy as knocking the head off a thistle. The thing does nothing. Even the anti-abolition side in the referendum campaign acknowledged that much (apart from a single, bizarre instance of groupthink, more of which anon). And even though all the No advocates trumpeted reform, reform, reform at every turn, reform was never an option. The sovereign people were asked to vote on whether the Seanad was to stay or to go. Nothing else.

So were the people hoodwinked by this talk of reform, whose chances are about the same as Ireland qualifying for the World Cup – possible, certainly, but by no means probable? Or did something else happen?

Your faithful correspondent has two theories about this. The first is that the Seanad was saved because the Yes side made such a tremendous hames of their campaign. Referenda are adversarial contests, like trials in courts of law. If you want to make a case, you don’t spare the blade – you go straight for the jugular.

It was suggested at the start of the summer that if the Government did want to shoot down the Seanad, it had to make the case that the Seanad was a rabid dog that must be shot for the safety of the community. Scaremongering? Of course, but certainly how referenda have been fought here in the past – hello divorce, goodbye Daddy, vote no to Lisbon/Nice to avoid being conscripted into the pan-European army, vote yes to Lisbon/Nice or else have the Albanians holding telethons to feed the starving Irish, and all the rest of it. Dirty of course, but politics is a dirty game.

What did we get instead? The world’s most watery excuse, that the abolition of the Seanad would save €20 million per year. In ten days’ time, the nation will be looking at steering a €3.5 billion budget “adjustment” through the houses of the Oireachtas. €20 million is 0.0057% of €3.5 billion, five thousandths of one per cent. Doesn’t seem like a lot in the bigger picture.

Did the Government then hammer the Seanad as useless, a drain on scarce resources, a dead weight in the body politic? No, it did not. A meme developed during the campaign that great additions had been made to Irish public life by Senators like Gordon Wilson, Mary Robinson, David Norris and WB Yeats. And this was accepted across the board, instead of being attacked in every instance.

Gordon Wilson’s great moment of forgiveness occurred in a TV interview, not the Seanad chamber. Mary Robinson jacked in her job as First Citizen of the sovereign Irish nation to trade up to the UN, treating the highest office in the land as nothing more than a stepping stone, a back to climb upon on her way to higher ground. (Robbo was also the victim of a truly vicious yet strangely endearing autobiography review by her one-time compatriot Mary Kenny in the Spectator magazine last year). And Norris could have been dismissed by simply playing VT of his extraordinary and disgraceful attack on Regina Doherty at the start of the campaign over and over again.

None of this is very nice and almost none of it is even fair but again, we’re playing politics here. This is how the game is played.

WB Yeats is the most interesting of the four Senatorial icons, but again the Yes side failed to point out that there is virtually no similarity between the Free State Senate of which Yeats was a member and the modern Seanad, of which both Richard Bruton and Labour’s chief (if not only) Yes advocate, Alex White, were members.

And this is perhaps what was the final nail in the Yes coffin. It was impossible, in the end, to figure out just where the Seanad ended and the rest of the body politic began. What made the Seanad so much worse than the county councils below it or the Dáil above it?

The Seanad has sixty seats. Three are for Trinity Senators who talk among and are admired by themselves, and are utterly irrelevant to anyone else. Three are for NUI Senators, who have been a mixed bag between teachers’ union hacks, wannabe Trinity Senators and Rónán Mullen.

There are eleven Taoiseach nominees, most of whom are party hacks or those to whom the Government party owes a favour. And then there are the forty-three others, county-councillors elected by other county-councillors in a tightly closed and confined bubble where a single preference in the twelfth county can be the difference between success and failure.

Political paths go from the council to the Dáil. Some councillors stop off on the Seanad, either on their way up or as a safety net from not having made the leap to the Dáil. It is one-half nursery and one-half nursing home. Nothing else. All this talk about scrutiny and safety valves is blather.

And it’s blather because the majority of Ireland’s laws are now made in either Brussels or Berlin. Gavin Reilly, the excellent political correspondent at Today FM, reckons "over 500 EU-related statutory instruments signed by ministers without parliamentary input," which then begs the question of what exactly it is the Dáil does.

And this is the second reason the Seanad hasn’t been abolished. The people didn’t see the point of abolishing the Seanad because they felt it would change nothing.

The people, based on the result of this referendum, the turnout of recent referenda, and the extraordinary prevalence of independents as viable Dáil candidates suggests that the people have almost given up on the very notion of governing their affairs, and are reasonably content to let faceless mandarins in the EU run the shop.

The Irish nation don’t cherish independence anymore. The founding moment of the state, the 1916 Rising, is being airbrushed into the background by this totally spurious "decade of commemoration," and nobody seems to mind. The Irish nation not only no longer knows who it is, but it no longer cares. We are on the verge of giving up, and letting the country be ruled from outside once more.

This is the real lesson about the state of democracy in Ireland in the aftermath of the failed attempt to abolish the Seanad.

The Seanad Referendum: Why Go Looking for Trouble?

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

The last thing a sensible person should go looking for in life is trouble. Why would you go looking for something that is more than willing to come looking for you?

When Enda Kenny was elected Taoiseach two years ago, trouble was the one thing in the country that was not in short supply. The country was broke, nobody could go for a bag of chips without checking with first with Berlin if they could have both salt and vinegar, and it wasn’t so much a question of hoping the 80s wouldn’t return as praying to the living God that we wouldn’t be pitched all the way back to the 50s, or worse.

In those stormiest of days, Enda kept a steady hand on the tiller. He held his nerve in Europe and has reaped rewards. The bailout will soon be over. The man should be hailed a hero.

But that’s not what’s happening. For reasons best known to himself, when he should be basking in the warm glow of clear and visible success, the Taoiseach and his government have got themselves mired in two crises from which the rewards if successful are slim, and the punishments if unsuccessful and many and painful.

On abortion, the Government’s handling of the hottest of Irish political potatoes for the past thirty years has been anything but sure, and the outcome of current moves to legislate for the X-Case is anything but certain. The battle is very far from over.

All this was trouble that the Government didn’t need with the economy in such dire straits – and don’t forget, even though the Government has done great work, the country is very, very far from saved yet. As such, with the huge issue of the economy looming over the state like the iceberg over the Titanic, and the abortion nightmare rearing its head again, the very last thing the Government needed to do was to hold a referendum that isn’t wanted by the people, that is unpopular among their own parties, that is badly thought out, difficult to explain and can only lead to heartache and woe down the line. And yet, for reasons best known to themselves, that is exactly what the Government has chosen to do.

The first Seanad was founded under two noble auspices. It was set up as part of the 1922 Free State Constitution with a view to protecting  the Protestant minority in the Free State, a protection that minority badly needed – their treatment in the triumphalist early years of the State should be a cause of burning shame to every Irish citizen.

When Eamon DeValera introduced his own constitution in 1937, he retained the second chamber but built it around the idea of vocationalism. Vocationalism was the idea that there was a Christian (ie, Catholic) social order, where everyone had a place and there was a place for everyone, a doctrine that was worked out in papal encyclicals from Leo XIII and Pius XI.

This is where the idea of the panels in the Seanad come from, that each social order would be reflected in the various panels. The Seanad recognises five vocations in Irish life, and categorises them as Agriculture, Labour, Administration, Cultural and Educational, and Industrial and Commercial. Farmers, manual workers, civil servants, teachers and shopkeepers to you and me.

And this is where it gets tricky. How relevant vocationalism is in the 21st Century would be more a matter for Father Hoban over the way but Leo XIII reigned at the end of the 19th Century and Pius XI until the start of the Second World War and neither of those may be considered today or yesterday. There are big changes in the world since.

And even if it were relevant, if vocationalism were a magic bullet of social organisation and cohesion, exactly how much of a role does it play in deciding whom is elected to which panel? What qualifications must you hold to get on the Agricultural Panel, or the Industrial and Commercial Panel? How come you’re on one and not the other?

And what of the baroque inside-out method of filling those Seanad seats? We enjoy elections in Ireland – why don’t we hear more about the inside and outside panel seats, who’s been nominated by what body, what difference .874 votes can make on the 13th count? Isn’t all the world’s drama there? Or does the fact that the Seanad currently does as much work as a child’s rocking horse pulling a plough take something of the bloom from the rose?

This is another problem with this referendum. Both sides are as one in saying that the current Seanad is a crock. The Government says wreck it, the Opposition says reform it.

But if the referendum is lost, will the Seanad ever be reformed? Or will it just tick on like it does, filling inside and outside seats in panels of Administrators, Educators, Labourers, Industrialists and Farmers who do not themselves administer, educate, labour, indust [sic] or farm? Is there any way the people can win in this, or do they end up with the worst possible option, yet again?

It’s early days in the campaign yet, but it’s interesting to note that the Government has not gone bald-headed in an attack on the Seanad. To win the election, they should portray the Seanad as a rabid dog that must be shot on sight for the safety of the village. Instead, they’re portraying the second chamber as Old Shep, who has to be taken back the land by his weeping master, holding his shotgun in one hand and his spade in the other. Who wants to pull that trigger?

Of course, politicians can’t go bald-headed and attack the Seanad for doing nothing because it’s they themselves that are inside in it, doing that same nothing. Hasn’t anybody thought this out beforehand? With everything that that needs doing in the country, with everything the Government have on their plate, why would they bother with the Seanad? Why are they looking for trouble?

A Great Day to be Middling as the Referendum Scrapes Home

The Children’s Referendum has been passed by a majority of the minority who turned out to vote. Good luck to it, but it’s hard not be deeply cynical about what all this amounts to in real terms, if anything at all.

The sovereign people are being castigated – again – by the commentariat for a low-turn out in the referendum. But it’s not hard to understand the low turnout at all. Vincent Browne castigated the referendum as "mainly a stunt" in the Irish Times but, reluctantly, decided to go with a Yes vote. Did most people find the thing equally watery, and therefore decided to pass on it? It seems the most likely scenario.

The Government should be grateful – voting No in cases of doubt is a more civic-minded strategy than abstaining. Your correspondent went one step further than Browne and voted No, and is sorry more didn’t. The Irish political establishment badly needs a slap into reality, and this was a chance to deliver that slap.

An idea developed in Irish public life that Ireland must have a Children’s Referendum. Over twenty years, this gained the status of Received Wisdom. A parallel understanding of what that Children’s Referendum would specifically be about did not evolve with this Received Wisdom, so people filled in the blanks as suited their own agendas at a particular time. It was all very high on ideals and light on specifics.

This is problematic because Ireland’s is a protective, rather than an aspirational, constitution (a distinction you can read more about here). This means that a lot of blather about protecting children and children’s rights is never going to be more than blather. Proposals must be specific and able to withstand legal challenge. Vague generalities just don’t cut it.

At first, it looked like Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald had steered an expert path through extremely choppy seas. For years, the commentariat looked forward to the Children’s Referendum as another Ypres or Passchendale in the culture war as DeValera’s Ireland crumbles and Fintan O’Toole’s Ireland is being built. But when the wording was finally announced there was: silence. Absolute and deafening.

There was no credible opposition to the Children’s Referendum. None. The Catholic Church gave the wording its blessing and all the parties in the Dáil called and campaigned for a Yes vote. Fitzgerald had a potential political triumph on her hands. How could a landslide not be inevitable?

And yet it wasn’t. The more people looked at the referendum campaign the more they struggled to find what it was the thing actually did. The referendum would “protect children’s rights,” we were told. But protect how? Which children? Which rights? In what way would the abuses of the past forty years not have happened if this amendment were in the constitution originally? It was all maddeningly unspecific.

There was the “small step” argument, that the passing of this referendum would unlock a door that would lead to a torrent of legislation that would safeguard children in danger and build a brighter future for all. But everybody knows that the country has no money. The country can’t provide current services, without signing up for a raft of new ones.

The one specific in the referendum campaign had to do with adoption. If the referendum had been called the Adoption Referendum would it have attracted a bigger turnout and a stronger majority? Even though the No side, such as it was, concentrated their arguments on the notion of the family, the reality is that the family has undergone profound redefinition since the sovereign people passed the Irish constitution seventy-five years ago.

All a citizen need do is pass an unhappy hour at Abbey or Jervis Luas stops in heart of the nation’s capital city and he or she will need no further convincing that there are children in this state whose parents are no more capable of raising them than they are of raising the dead.

But no. A small victory on adoption was beneath the government’s aspiration. They wanted to promote full duck Children’s Rights Referendum and were then astonished when people saw past the red-haired little girls and weeping little boys to a whole heap of nothing.

So whether the referendum was passed or shot down really didn’t matter. Nothing will change. The whole thing was an exercise in the tokenism that Irish public life specializes in.

The reward for the political parties now is that Labour can return to their core voters and say look, we have delivered on a bedrock principle, while the rest of the parties sigh a sigh of relief that this damnable thing is finally done with and nobody will wreck their heads about it for a generation at least.

Next up on the reform agenda is the Constitutional Convention, where the pressing issue on which Ireland holds her breath is whether the Presidential term of office should be reduced to five years or remain at the current seven. One feels the foundations of the state tremble at the thought of change, real change, change we can believe in.

We are where we are. At the airport, leaping on planes to get the hell away from this madness.

We Must Teach Economics as a Core Subject in Schools

Every now and again someone in public life likes to pound the table and declare that the absence of this subject or that subject is a blight on the Irish education system. Some people think the children should be taught how to play a musical instrument. Some think it would be something of a miracle to get the little monsters to read and/or write, to say nothing of asking them to bang out sonatas on the piano. And so the long day wears on.

The latest to enter the lists is Senator Professor John Crown, who got busy on the Twitter machine over the weekend. The Senator is concerned about a certain level of scientific ignorance in the general population, remarking that “high levels of scientific ignorance in a society are very dangerous.” He went on say that “every person should do science in school right up to school leaving age,” on the basis that precise analytical skills will stand to students in their adult lives.

And that’s very laudable, of course. It would be lovely if people were more scientifically minded. Unfortunately, right now the nation cannot afford it. We cannot afford it in terms of money but more importantly, we cannot afford it in terms of time.

If any mathematically based subject should be brought front and centre in Irish education right now it isn’t science. It is economics.

Last week the sovereign Irish nation allowed the state to ratify the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union done at Brussels on the 2nd day of March 2012. All the evidence is that this was a blind vote on the nation’s behalf.

The nation voted on a Treaty that it didn’t understand, and that couldn’t be explained to it in the time frame given. The level of economic literacy needed to understand the arguments about the worth or otherwise of the Treaty doesn’t exist in the general populace.

What’s going on currently in Europe is extremely complex. Because of our history, we are brought up with the notion that states are formed because of nationhood – that no-one can set a boundary on the march of a nation, as Parnell put it.

But states can be formed for economic benefit too, and that is what is currently happening in Europe. A common language and culture is fine in a state, but what really butters the parsnips in a state is a common currency.

One of the reasons that the Euro failed is because it was created without the protections that exist for other, “proper” currencies – a central government and a central bank that regulates the flow of currency. One of the results of the referendum, of the establishment of the EU Stability treaty and the Spanish banks sliding slowly and surely to their doom, is that the European Central Bank is now being built, brick by brick, with the European Government to follow.

What that means in Ireland is referenda a go-go. Matt Cooper outlined this position in the Sunday Times and his article makes for distressing reading. More and more referenda will come down the line and each one will, by definition, trade sovereignty for economic benefit. And each referendum will be more and more fraught, for two reasons. The first is because sovereignty was so hard won in the first place and the second reason is because people genuinely don’t understand the economics of what’s happening.

One of early reactions to the Treaty vote was to identify a clear class division in Ireland, between a pro-austerity middle class and an anti-austerity working class. But is that true? Does the electorate understand how all this works? Are they sufficiently informed to make a judgment? Do the people really understand the full implications of austerity, the alternatives to austerity or the possibility of implementing one of the other?

Chances are they don’t. Economics isn’t taught as a core subject in Irish schools and it really ought to be. Generations have grown up and gone into the world without ever fully understanding just how money makes it go round.

Why is the West richer than the East? The West is richer than the East because the West is better able to generate money through borrowing and lending with banks. The East has a religious object to usury – there is no such problem in the West. Banks create wealth in a capitalist economy.

Why did the British Empire triumph and the Spanish Empire fall? The sinking of the Spanish Armada in 1588 certainly, but also because the British were so much better at trading. All the gold the Spanish looted from South America became worth less and less, because money is a measure of worth, and not actual wealth in and of itself.

That’s how the modern world was created, but most people don’t know it because it’s not taught in school.

It would be lovely if all subjects were taught in school. It would be lovely if the state could produce a population that saw all forms of knowledge as having their own particular merit. But in modern Ireland, the nation is being lost through lack of economic understanding. If it must be a choice between science and economics, the best bet is to follow the money.

More Woe for the Minister for Misfortune

When was the last time Phil Hogan had a good night’s sleep? It must be a long, long time ago. The household charge and the water charge were bad, but now the Minister for Misfortune has gone and signed the behemoth, the destructor, the Ender of All Things: another EU referendum.

Once the actual Compact was signed in Brussels last year, the Government’s position was heads-straight-into-the-sand and fervent and honest pray that, if it be the Supreme Court’s will, this cup would pass from them. No chance of that – when the bad luck is on you, it’s on your dog and your cat.

A referendum, then, and the thing settled once and for all. Of course, if the Government were interested in settling things once and for all, they would put a much further reaching referendum on the table, asking the sovereign nation if we wanted to be grown-up about the full and true nature of European Union. But no; as it has done on so many issues in its first year in power, the Government has shown extraordinary cowardice in the place where leadership ought to be, and chosen what it hopes to be the path of least resistance.

In that minimalist light, the Government’s task should have been simple. The pro-Treaty campaign should have been about putting the fear of the Living God in the nation, showing them an Ireland that is so horrible, bitter, poor and repressed that it could only have come about through either rejection of this miraculous treaty or else as the issue of a horrible drunken tryst between Mr Frank McCourt and Ms Peig Sayers.

Having terrified the nation with a vision they will never forget, it’s then an easy matter to just blow the whistle and shout “all aboard!” for the lovely EU Fiscal Treaty. The train is instantly filled with a majority of the shocked and relieved.

The Government have to conjour this Vision of Woe because their own and the previous government’s attitude to the bailout has left a hostage to fortune. The problem is this: borrowing, in and of itself, isn’t actually a bad thing.

All governments borrow. If you’re going to borrow money, then the current borrowing rate of 3% is manifestly better than 11% or more in the open market. The bailout is good business, and that’s clear to anyone sufficiently numerate to count the difference between three and eleven. You don’t even need to take off your shoes to do the math.

But the Government spent the past two years, in power and in opposition, saying that the bailout was the very end of Irish sovereignty itself. They can’t now turn around and say musha, it's not that bad at all now, when you think about it.

Therefore, the only option left is to say that while the bailout is a Very Bad Thing, shooting down the referendum is Peig McCourt, Frank Sayers, Worse than Cromwell, The End of Life as We Know It, or any combination of the foregoing. They’ve already committed to the Bailout as Disaster course; they’re stuck with it.

A pity, then,  that that nobody told the Government about the election in France when they were creating their ogre. If François Hollande gets elected in France, he’s going to renegotiate the Treaty. That takes the crusher to the Ogre of Doom, and softens his cough rightly.

If the Government’s plan is a Fear-of-God campaign, where disaster will surely follow the fall of the Treaty, why hasn’t anybody told Monsieur Hollande? Monsieur Hollande does not seem to think that Doom, Death and Disaster are the natural and inevitable consequences of this Treaty not going through. Where does that leave the Irish Government, who must declare the opposite to pass their referendum?

It leaves the Government in the position of the poker player whose bluff has been called. At the start, when there was a cranks' alliance against the Treaty, the Government could appeal to the mature section of society. Thing is, the mature section like to holiday in France, and are fully aware of what an Hollande win might mean.

As for Éamon Ó Cuív’s solo running – it’s a nightmare for the establishment. Ó Cuív is seen as a crank in Doheny and Nesbitt’s, but he’s a man with a lot of respect in bars that don’t have wine lists. He should be underestimated at the Government’s utter peril.

In the interests of full disclosure, your correspondent will be voting Tá himself. While France is in a position to renegotiate, being rich, Ireland is not, being poor. Only thing is An Spailpín is generally in a minority in his opinions, and there are enough people out there who have been stoked beyond the rational in their fury that will vote Níl on the merest encouragement, out of sheer bitterness and betrayal.

And the Government won’t be able to blame their predecessors on this one. This mess is all of their own making. How could they not know the French elections were happening and that the Europe would be central to the debate in France? It’s incompetence on a staggering scale.

Anyone for Leadership?

How craven is the Government’s attitude to the inevitable EU referendum? It’s not quite as craven as the man in the women and children’s lifeboat but goodness gracious, it’s a long step away from the bold Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock in terms of inspiring the nation and giving light in darkness.

It seems clear that the Government will spend from now until the final EU deal is settled praying that God will somehow intervene and save them from having to bring another EU referendum before the people. The Government will not be alone in this; the entire Irish political establishment will be praying every bit as hard.

In a functioning democracy, the referendum would be a matter of course. In a country where there is political talent and will, they could even write a new constitution that would prevent these constant referenda clogging up the path to progress.

But Ireland is not a functioning democracy. It is a state governed by a tiny elite. A tiny elite who have zero interest in leading the people. A tiny elite who have zero interest in explaining what the European Union is and how Ireland has benefited immeasurably from it since 1973.

A tiny elite who prefers treat the sovereign people as mushrooms, explaining the EU only in terms of either a gravy train that hands out free loot (1973-2011) or an oppressor who grind the helpless Irish under a jackboot, in the face of which the sovereign people and their glorious government are equally helpless (2011-present day).

Successive Governments have refused to make it clear to the people just how Ireland integrates in terms of the EU whole, and just how high we are punching above our weight. Instead, the nation is told to eat their sweets and don’t be worrying their little heads.

Ireland has become a sink estate of the EU, living on handouts with not only no interest in bettering its own situation, but with no idea if or how that situation can bettered in the first place.

Which is how the latest mess has come to pass. Now the political elite has to go the electorate and present another referendum to the people. Another referendum that will be impossible to understand, at a moment in time when the people are very far from being receptive.

That was one of the problems with Lisbon. Referenda work best with simple issues that can be clearly expressed. Treaties, or, the Lord save us, “compacts,” can only be properly understood by constitutional lawyers. Joe Citizen hasn’t a chance.

It should never have come to this. The political class should have seen this coming since Maastricht twenty years ago, if not since ascension in 1973. Start as you mean to continue.

But they didn’t see it coming. Not even kinda. The implications of Maastricht didn’t even get a mention in Seán Duignan’s memoir of his time as Government press secretary of the time.

The chief concerns of the Government in June 1992, when Maastricht was passed, was whether they’d have to devalue the punt or what would happen at the Beef Tribunal. The Beef Tribunal!

Maastricht went through the Irish political system painlessly, without raising a single flag. The patient never felt a thing.

John Waters rightly called out Olivia O’Leary when she was doing to post-hoc reasoning on her radio piece for RTÉ’s Drivetime recently. The only people who objected to Maastricht were loopers like the Democratic Left and the late Ray Crotty. Every else just said: “Free loot? Where do I sign?”

When people become adjusted to a continual flow of European wine and honey, you can understand how they might get cranky when that flow is suddenly switched to cod liver oil. And the longer the political elite puts off having a birds and bees conversation with the nation about the nature of the European Union, the harder it’ll be to save the day.

Because the day can still be saved. The Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil officer class understand how Europe works, even if they have been shockingly remiss in bringing the rank and file with them. Labour’s days of opposing Europe are well behind them and besides; a EU referendum would be a good chance for the Minister for Foreign Affairs to show the statesmanship he wittered on about so tiresomely before the election.

The floating joker is Sinn Féin of course. Sinn Féin have been quiet since Friday, as they do their accounting on how the land lies. Good for them.

Sinn Féin have been anti every EU referenda. It will be interesting to see how they could oppose this one – and thus side with David Cameron, leader of the one country in Europe which has been less well served by its leaders about the EU than ourselves.

Kicking Sinn Féin has only recently been replaced by kicking the pope as a Fine Gael favourite pastime. Will even the chance to put Gurry on the hot seat for while tempt the Government to say to hell with it, we’ll have a referendum and live or die by it? Or will they stay hiding under the table, hoping the storm will pass?