Thrice 'No' for the EU 'Constitution'

It'll be on every bulletin across the EU and probably even the rest of the western world. Ireland has voted to reject the Lisbon Treaty. I'm surprised, but not shocked. It doesn't seem to have been all that close either, although most of the votes aren't counted yet. Still anything over a 53% vote for 'No' is, to my mind, a pretty solid rejection. That makes it a hat trick given that the French & Dutch already said 'No' to this constitution in treaty's clothing.

Mary Flynn, a nurse from Dublin, summed up a general sentiment when speaking to the Washington Post.

"I don't understand a good lot of it; I don't know what it does," Flynn, a 49-year-old nurse, said of the complex, 300-page treaty. Ireland "would be nothing," she acknowledged, without the billions of dollars the E.U. has given this once-poor country in the past 35 years. But she said she voted against the treaty: "If you don't know, you vote no."

The analysis of what went wrong will go on for days/weeks, but people were being asked to/bullied into agreeing to simply trust the politicians. Not a winning formula in a referendum.