However I think that all other countries should move forward and build a Union based on the Lisbon treaty.

My own personal reason for rejecting it, is the deeply flawed decision to use the Lisbon Treaty to advance an unsustainable energy policy.

Currently the treaty is a hideous frankenstein’s monster of a document. Part constitution, part policy recommendations and part bureaucratic admin.

In truth those three functions should have remained separate. The treaty proper should have been an easily-comprehensible, short document that contained a series of core principles and statements.

The pages upon pages of paragraph and clause renumbering bureaucratic administrivia should have been consigned to a separate document (one that would not require ratification so long as it stayed away from law and policy and stuck rigidly to housekeeping tasks).

And the policy recommendations (such as the endorsement of nuclear energy as a central plank of European energy policy) should not be within a million miles of the treaty / constitution and should instead have been the first issues to be debated by the post-treaty parliament.

Instead — at least as far as I’m concerned — those policy recommendations will ensure that the treaty never gets passed.

One could pose the question – why is the EU so complex; I have a strong feeling that it consists on a official level of 27 (at present) distinct elements (whose leaderships all wanting something slightly different) might have something to do with it.

However, I concur with the assertion that the Constitutional process, i.e. the Convention, should have had a pre-determined set of rules limiting its output to a set word limit. The single lesson I (and hopefully all Europeans) have learned from this entire painful exercise is that European matters should be determined by a European electorate.

So if the Lisbon Treaty does go down, perhaps our so called political masters might like to try again with something much simpler and then put it to the European people en-masse, simultaneously.

Detractors of closer European integration always claim, with some justification, that there is no such thing as a European demos and therefore any (even quite vague) sense of European political unity can never be established with a degree of legitimacy.

I agree with that claim up to a point, any sense of broad European affinity cannot be expected to appear like a rabbit from a magician’s hat; it must emerge over a prolonged period but one sure way of initiating that long drawn out process is to allow Europeans to deliberate collectively upon an issue (or several) of European import.

Therefore what could be more natural than using some form of constitutional statement (strictly limited in scope) as a vehicle to kick start said process?

See the comments below this french article http://www.liberation.fr/actualite/monde/330142.FR.php
Most of the commentators wish Ireland could vote NO.

If ever it’d happened, this would be a huge slap in the face of the European Commision technocrats who are completely disconnected from reality. The current way the European Union is designed is mainly in the interest of politicians and media and definitely not in the interest of the majority of the people.

If ever Ireland voted YES, Europe would become the poodle-puppet of the USA, specially into military domains.

Please, be wise, vote NO and do not fear the pressure of the press and of politicians.