Libertas.org

 “Just 25 per cent of people say they will vote Yes to the EU Reform Treaty, agreed in Lisbon last month, while 13 per cent intend to vote No and a massive 62 per cent say they don’t know or have no opinion. In a comparable poll on the EU Constitutional Treaty in March 2005, 46 per cent said they would vote Yes as against 12 per cent who would vote No and 42 per cent who had no opinion.”

The poll has suggested that the parties will have a struggle on their hands to convince the electorate to vote in favour of this treaty.

The first Nice referendum result (Ireland voted no) showed the political parties that they could not simply expect the electorate to do as they were told. The second Nice campaign resulted in Ireland’s biggest party spending almost ten times as much as they did on the previous campaign (€500,000 second time around, compared to €60,000 on Nice 1). The political parties themselves may not have the enthusiasm for spending such huge amounts of money on campaigning, with a General Election one year behind them, and local and European elections the following year, the parties may need to look at their funding.