Will Irish Ayes Be Smiling?

Are the Irish going to reject the Lisbon Treaty in next month’s referendum? Perhaps so, although they have never really grown used to not being part of something bigger. They only went into the Eurofederalist project because we were doing so, and the subsequent thirty-five years of Brussels government by proxy have been, and remain, a seamless continuation of the preceding fifty years of London government by proxy.

Yet they rejected Nice. We can only hope that the penny is almost literally dropping: £50 billion in EU largesse is only one third of the £150 billion that their fisheries have lost as a direct consequence of EU membership. And the whole thing, both in itself and because it is an integral part of globalisation, has homogenised Irish culture and society to within an inch of being totally indistinguishable from the culture and society of anywhere else on earth.