This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. Ireland seems to have

rejected a reform of the European Union that would have further centralized

power in Brussels.

Marion Tupi, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity

comments.

Lisbon Treaty is really a carbon copy of the European Constitution that was

rejected by the French and the Dutch in their referenda in 2002 and after the defeat of the original concept of the EU

constitution the European elites essentially decided that they were going to give it another try and

this time they decided not to allow the people of Europe a direct say over the EU constitution which then was simply

renamed as the Lisbon Treaty and they were going to ram the treaty through national parliaments

except in Ireland where the Irish Constitution demands that you have to have a referendum on any such treaty,

where indeed the Irish government was forced to allow this referendum to take place and we all know what

happened. In Ireland the campaign in favor of the treaty outspent the campaign

that that was opposed to it. What did it come down to for the Irish?

It is incredibly important to understand the amount of disaffection amongst the people of Europe

with regard to the direction of... amongst the

European Union

yes campaign had truly the entire political lead behind it the no campaign was outspent very very heavily

essentially the the whole apparatus of the state was supporting the yes campaign and yet they didn't manage to win no was triumphant and for a number of reasons.

One of the reasons is that the Irish feel like many other people in Europe who didn't have a say about this treaty

that more and more decision-making is centralized in Brussels where the political elites are not

subject to the kind of democratic pressures that you get in other European in in in an enormous circumstances so in other words

...