Saturday column: Hopelessly Lost in Lisbon

EVERY ONCE IN a while an issue comes along that is of great importance to the State and its citizens, which must be discussed openly and about which the people will ultimately have their say.

But which just happens to be so dry that people’s eyelids involuntarily droop at the very mention of it, their brains rebel 30 seconds into every debate, and their breath quickens when anyone asks them for their opinion. Because they realise that, yes, it’s a terrifically important issue - it just happens to be really hard to pay attention.

You’ll have guessed by now that this is a column about the Lisbon treaty.

On RTÉ1’s Questions and Answers on Monday night, it was asked whether the Government is avoiding a full debate on the Treaty. It could just as easily have been asked whether the people are avoiding it.

John McGuirk of Libertas first echoed anti-treaty campaigner Ulick McEvaddy’s claim that the document is “drivel”. Then he suggested the Government should send a copy to every household so that we could read it ourselves. This is a clever tactic, because having read it himself, McGuirk knows well that nobody else will. The treaty is hard going. Not hard like reading Finnegans Wake; hard like reading Finnegans Wake in Latin and backwards.

It begins with a certain grandeur - its first words being “His Majesty the King of the Belgians” - but that does not last. The workings and aspirations of the European Union are laid out in politically sensitive legalese. Occasionally it breaks out into brain-petrifying attempts at clarification, such as this: “Title IV shall take over the heading of Title VII, PROVISIONS ON ENHANCED COOPERATION, and Articles 27a to 27e, Articles 40 to 40b and Articles 43 to 45 shall be replaced by the following Article 10, which shall also replace Articles 11 and 11a of the Treaty establishing the European Community. These same articles shall also be replaced by Articles 280A to 280I of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, as set out below in point 278 of Article 2 of this Treaty.”

All of which reveals another problem. The Lisbon treaty is so much about amendments and inserts to previous treaties, it dawns on you that this is not a document that can be read on its own. Instead, you would have to go back and also read the Nice treaty. Which itself is an amendment to the ones before it, and so on. If the Government was to keep us fully informed, it would require a number of postal trucks to rival the D-Day fleet.

By the way, the Lisbon treaty is also available in Irish, should you choose not to read it in our native tongue.

So, here is the problem for the media. They still need to report it, discuss it, treat it as if the general readership is interested. What they are doing is right and proper and necessary in a functioning democracy with a healthy press. It just happens to be quite a page-turner, in the wrong sense of the phrase.

As for those debating it on Questions and Answers, the question was posed by a member of an interest group, and the first hand raised was by someone from another interest group. While the debate is supposed to be aimed at the public, it is, in fact, largely happening between people who have already made up their minds. They are like performers who kick off the show three months before the audience enters the auditorium.

We know that people will struggle to pay attention to this issue, because opinion polls have shown that not only is there likely to be a low turnout, but that the “don’t knows” are at very high levels. When will they decide? As the American pollsters get to grips with their regular inability to accurately predict the presidential primaries, among their realisations is that people not only lie to pollsters but that they don’t actually make up their minds until the last couple of days.

This is what is likely to happen here. People already know that it is slightly pointless watching a discussion on Questions and Answers this week, when it will come up again most weeks until the referendum. Instead, they will largely tune out of the debate, treating it as background noise for a few weeks, until they realise that there are a few days to go until the vote and they had better make up their minds quick.

So they’ll suddenly engage with the coverage and read and listen to what they can before making a choice. Or they’ll make a decision based on some other political issue entirely, or depending which side they believe most, or perhaps with which side they least want to align themselves.

Either way, only a handful of us will have read the thing. Putting it through the letterbox won’t change that.