Ireland votes — will Europe listen?

Ireland will go to the polls on the eurozone fiscal compact. It can't derail the deal, but Irish objections can't be written off, says Jason Walsh.

Irish attorney general Máire Whelan's decision that a referendum was needed on the fiscal compact deal will have been greeted with sighs of despair across Europe, nowhere less than in Ireland itself.

The referendum has already had one casualty in the grand tradition of deputy heads rolling. Éamon Ó Cuív has been forced to step down from his position as deputy leader of opposition party Fianna Fáil due to his failure to support a yes vote.

But the Irish referendum is important for all of Europe, not just locally. Unlike Greece and Italy, which saw democratic governments toppled by EU diktat, Ireland's public is being given the opportunity to give its view on how the government and its EU paymasters have dealt with the disastrous fallout from the banking crisis.

How the Irish will vote is difficult to predict.

Anger at the EU is significant, but few in Ireland want to exit the euro and fewer still want to do so immediately. While rejection won't automatically throw Ireland onto the fringes of Europe, there is no question it would mean Irish politicians would lose top table access.

A January poll for the Sunday Business Post found that 40 per cent of voters would vote yes to the treaty and 36 per cent would vote no. The difference falls just outside the three per cent margin of error and a full 24 per cent remained undecided.

Ireland's almost uniformly pro-EU media will, with the exception of a few lone columnists, throw its lot in with the governing Fine Gael and Labour coalition.

Opposition will be led on the left by Sinn Féin and the United Left Alliance, but conservative forces have also signaled opposition to the deal. Speaking at the announcement of the referendum, independent member of parliament Shane Ross, a former stock broker and journalist, echoed this view, demanding a "quid-pro-quo" debt write-off in return for a "yes" vote.

Bête noire of the Lisbon treaty Declan Ganley will announce his position at 2PM (1PM CET) today at a debate at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth.

Ganley is expected to oppose the compact, but it's not entirely certain. Despite being routinely depicted as a eurosceptic, Ganley is in fact a federalist and has in the past supported other EU treaties such as Nice.

Speaking to PressEurop this morning, Ganley said: "It's not Lisbon three [and] we're not voting on the ESM treaty. That's not what this treaty is about."

But what is it about? Speaking in December, finance minister Michael Noonan darkly noted any referendum would be about Irish membership of the euro. The EU has already rejected this scenario, but there is no question that the vote will be about more than just the details of the Merkozy deal.

In reality two questions will be running through people's heads as they tick the box: in the long term, will the EU help Ireland rebuild its economy, and, how much growth-killing austerity do Germany and France think they can impose on the country.

Image by EamonCurry123. CC Licenced.