Bad News from Ireland

There's no sugar-coating the election results. Irish voters, hit hard by the global recession and plunging property values, inexplicably decided that these factors somehow justified voting for the Lisbon Treaty (a.k.a., the EU Constitution) and giving more power to the statist bureaucracy in Brussels. The Wall Street Journal Europe is appropriately skeptical about whether this was the right decision:

The people of Ireland approved the treaty 67.1% to 32.9%, with a 59% turnout—higher participation and wider margins than the "No" camp had been able to muster when the Irish rejected the same charter last year. ...Brussels now tells us the vote was a resounding Yes for further centralization of power in the EU's 27 member states, and represented satisfaction that Ireland had secured guarantees for its neutrality and abortion laws. A more convincing explanation is the global recession, which has hit the Celtic Tiger particularly hard. Irish unemployment now runs to 12.6%. Standard & Poor's has yanked the country's triple-A credit rating, which in turn has ratcheted up borrowing costs. All this made voters more susceptible to the argument that another "No" could have jeopardized Ireland's membership in the euro club and its access to the EU's single market—a baseless scenario that nonetheless was bound to have an effect on an electorate with pocketbook worries. ...one wonders how much economic authority the Irish are really prepared to hand over to Brussels, especially if that means giving it an effective veto (in the name of eradicating "unfair tax competition") over Dublin's pro-growth tax policies. It was those policies—and not membership in the EU, which dates to the early 1970s—that were chiefly responsible for transforming Ireland from one of the poorest countries in Europe in the early 1990s to one of the richest. All the more remarkable is that Ireland did this in the teeth of resistance from the same Brussels bureaucracy in which it now puts its trust.

This means President Klaus of the Czech Republic is the only meaningful barrier standing in the way of further centralization of the European Union. This is the man who has resisted the fanatics on global warming hysteria, so he has backbone. On behalf of the 26 nations that were denied a vote, let's hope he holds firm.