Here’s cheers to my Irish cousins ... congratulations on standing up to the tyranny of the EU.
The treaty was negotiated in Lisbon last December by EU leaders as a way of replacing the proposed European constitution, which had earlier been rejected by voters in France in the Netherlands.
It would have provided for many of the same Europe-wide government arrangements foreseen in the rejected constitution, but as an international treaty, only parliamentary approval was necessary for ratification.
The exception was Ireland, the lone European country that requires a referendum on all constitutional changes.
Opinion polls across Europe consistently show that political elites in member states are far more enthusiastic about making the EU into a supranational government than ordinary voters.