Irish Voters Research Articles

EVOLUTION OF THE ATTITUDE OF ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1ST DUKE OF WELLINGTON, TO THE PROBLEM OF CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (hereinafter the duke), was a staunch Tory. However, the consequences of the industrial revolution forced him to compromise. Changes in the economy have transformed the usual social order. Factory owners and bankers demanded access to political power. After them, others demanded equality. The duke, who held the post of prime minister, had to face Irish Catholics, demanding lifting of the ban on sitting in the Parliament and holding certain public positions. Thus, the duke in 1829 carried out the emancipation of Catholics, a liberal reform that destroyed the old political system. At the same time, the duke did not change his beliefs. He grew up in Catholic Ireland and knew Catholics. The duke was afraid of the increasing influence of the Catholic clergy rather than the denomination proper. Previously, the duke had put forward various options to neutralise this threat. The duke considered the higher clergy and landowners of other faiths worthy of gaining access to the government of the country. By destroying the old political system, the aristocratic duke took the opportunity to strengthen the dominance of the former elite. The property qualification was increased for Irish voters. The duke agreed to grant the Catholic political rights, since this did not violate the existing social order.

Brexit and prosperity but defeat: the economic vote conundrum in the 2020 Irish election

ABSTRACT At face, Ireland's economy had staged a remarkable recovery by 2020 since the devastating impact of the Global Financial Crisis. The economy was the fastest growing in Europe, unemployment had reached record lows, and Ireland's debt was back to its lowest level since 2009. The traditional economic voting model assumes voters punish outgoing governments for poor economic performance by voting against them but rewards incumbents for a sound economy by voting for them. Nevertheless, Irish voters delivered a stunning rebuke to the Fine Gael government in 2020, registering an incumbent administration's sixth-worst performance since 1932, raising questions about the applicability of the economic vote. Using the 2020 Irish National Election Study, our contribution unpacks this apparent puzzle. We uncover that macroeconomic conditions were less rosy than at first sight, a pattern recognised by voters. We find the economic vote was alive and well, with voter economic perceptions, and their views on income redistribution (and taxes/spending) having a potent effect on the vote. Brexit, as an economic issue, however, was not influential in shaping the vote. The Fine Gael challenge, and the answer to the conundrum, was most voters perceived the economy was lackluster and the government was on the wrong side of economic policy preferences of most voters.

Are Irish voters moving to the left?

ABSTRACT The Irish party system has been an outlier in comparative politics. Ireland never had a left-right divide in parliament, and for decades, the dominant centrist political parties competed around a centre-right policy agenda. The absence of an explicit left-right divide in party competition suggested that Irish voters, on average, occupy centre-right policy preferences. Combining survey data since 1973 and all Irish election studies between 2002 and 2020, we show that the average Irish voter now leans to the centre-left. We also show that income has recently emerged as a predictor of left-right self-placement, and that left-right positions increasingly structure vote choice. These patterns hold when using policy preferences on taxes, spending, and government interventions to reduce inequality as alternative indicators. We outline potential explanations for this leftward shift, and conclude that these developments might be anchored in economic inequalities and the left populist strategies of Sinn Féin.

The death of conservative Ireland? The 2018 abortion referendum

The outcomes of two recent Irish referendums - on marriage equality in 2015 and abortion in 2018 - have placed contemporary Irish voters in sharp contrast with their long-standing conservative Catholic reputation. These referendums also stand out internationally because of an associated deliberative innovation. This paper aims to explain the watershed abortion vote drawing on theories of generational change, issue-voting, cue-taking and deliberative democracy, using data from an exit poll at the 2018 abortion referendum. We show that cleavage and age effects are key to understanding the referendum outcome. These results offer insight into how societal processes such as rapid secularisation, generational replacement and democratic innovations shape politics. Moreover, voters who were aware of the deliberative innovation were more likely to support the liberal referendum option. To increase willingness to deviate from the status quo, engaging citizens actively in the debate is a fruitful approach.

Remaking democracy: Ireland as a role-model the 2019 Peter Mair lecture

ABSTRACT Ireland has experienced many of the (‘demand side') economic and cultural factors that have led to the rise of populism in democracies across the world: a major economic downturn, growing income inequality, and mass immigration. Also, at the individual level, the same socio-demographic characteristics seem to predict populist values in Ireland as in many other countries; with lower income and older Irish voters opposed to immigration, for example. Yet, trust in Irish democracy remains high, and Ireland does not have a radical right populist party. The explanation of Irelands apparent immunity to populism, I suggest, can be found in the way the Irish system of ‘supplemented democracy' (through STV, referendums, and deliberative mini-publics) has allowed for a highly responsive and representative polity. This raises a challenge for the standard views of populism in political science, as it suggests that more attention needs to be paid to political (‘supply-side’) factors that explain populism: of how and why democracy fails or succeeds to respond to potential populist challenges.

Vox Populi or abdication of responsibility?: The influence of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly on the public discourse regarding abortion, 2016-2019

The last four decades have witnessed enormous changes in the Republic of Ireland in terms of society, economy and politics. Formerly perceived as a poor, peripheral and “priest-ridden” country additionally plagued by political violence in Northern Ireland, over recent decades Irish voters have supported a series of “liberal causes”. Indeed, nowhere is this more apparent than Ireland’s laws concerning abortion, an issue which displayed a seismic shift not only among Irish voters but the political parties which claim to represent them, a shift clearly reflected in the public discourse. At the same time, it will be seen that the use of a Citizens’ Assembly as an exercise in “deliberative democracy” has allowed mainstream political parties to pass responsibility, at least partially, for changes to controversial laws to an extra-parliamentary body, thereby allowing them to claim that they were following the will of “the people” and finally settle one of the longest running conflicts in Irish political life. Thus, this article seeks to examine and describe both how effective the Irish Citizens’ Assembly was at achieving its stated goal and its influence on the nation’s public discourse concerning the issue of abortion.

The unfaithful Irish voter

ABSTRACTLocal and European elections have been held simultaneously since 1999. These offer an interesting context to look at the importance of party, both across each pair of elections and across these elections and future voting intentions. Analysis of behaviour in these elections suggests the influence of party is far from dominant. Exit polls and the 2002-7 Irish National election Study show around half of all voters supporting different parties in the two elections, and in some cases expressing vote intentions for the next general election that is different again. The elections of 2019 mark a low point in such cohesion.

Silk-Stocking Sympathy: American Whig Rhetoric and the Irish Famine

Silk-Stocking Sympathy:American Whig Rhetoric and the Irish Famine James M. Farrell (bio) On 11 November 1844 J. W. Mighels of Portland, Maine, wrote a letter to Henry Clay, who had just been defeated in the presidential election. Mighels styled himself a "native born Whig" and blamed Clay's loss in Maine on "an army of Irish paupers, set on and marsheled [sic] by their infernal priest."1 It was a view widely shared among members of the Whig Party, who felt the sting of defeat to James Polk and the Democrats. Clay's own running mate Theodore Frelinghuysen attributed the Whig electoral downfall to an "alliance of the foreign vote and that most impracticable of all organizations, the abolitionists." The Irish immigrant vote in New York City, he said, "was tremendous," and "it is an alarming fact that this foreign vote has decided the great questions of American policy—and counteracted a nation's gratitude."2 Clay lost the 1844 presidential election by a little more than 39,000 votes. More importantly, he lost electoral-college votes in several states like New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maine, and Michigan that had been won by the Whigs in 1840. In the earlier election William Henry Harrison carried nineteen states for the Whig ticket. Clay and the Whigs won only eleven states in the subsequent presidential election. Of course, there are many reasons why any particular election turns out the way it does: the candidates are different, the issues are different, the electorate is different. In 1844 American voters were concerned about the annexation of Texas, the dispute with [End Page 206] Great Britain over the Oregon Territory, and the growing influence of antislavery sentiment in an American politics that was becoming increasingly sectional.3 But the 1840s also saw a surge in immigration, particularly among the Germans and the Irish, most of whom were also Catholic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century about half-a-million Irish had settled in the United States. By 1845 another one million Irish immigrants had made America their home.4 Thus, even before the Great Famine, the Irish had become a potent political force in America, particularly in the urban areas of the eastern seaboard. Throughout the nineteenth century, and especially as their numbers grew, the Irish overwhelmingly favored the Democratic Party, and thus Irish political influence posed an existential threat to the Whig Party.5 Irish alignment with the Democratic Party is not difficult to understand. From its formative days as the coalesced opposition to Andrew Jackson, the Whig Party sought to be the conservative force in American politics. They were the party of business and wealth, and the party of moral reform. The Whigs attracted most of their support from the established ranks of middle- and upper-class American Protestants. They were, as one historian suggested, "anglophile elites."6 Although not all Whigs were bigots, the Whig Party had a virulent anti-Catholic element that continually fed nativist sentiment within its ranks. Most northern Whigs were also antislavery, a position that [End Page 207] put them at odds with Irish voters who mostly opposed the abolition of slavery, and who consistently expressed hostility toward both British and American abolitionists.7 From the Irish perspective the Whigs were "the party of Yankee Protestants and British-American immigrants," whereas the Democrats were more welcoming to Irish newcomers and more tolerant of their religion.8 Democrats portrayed Whigs as an elitist association of "narrow-minded, silk-stocking patricians bent on telling other people how to behave."9 For obvious reasons, elitist attitudes compounded with nativist sentiments and religious bigotry cannot form the foundation of a successful national political strategy, as Henry Clay and the Whigs had learned. "There can be no doubt of the greatness of the evil of this constant manufacture of American citizens out of foreign emigrants," Clay wrote to John Crittenden after his election loss. The most recent Irish immigrants, he thought, were "incapable of justly appreciating the duties incident to the new character which they assume."10 Indeed, during the 1844 election postmortem, "the belief that Clay was denied the presidency by the votes of immigrant Catholics became...

Europe's Jagged Little Pill: The Saga Surrounding the Ratification of the Lisbon Treaty Finally Comes to a Close

“Most people have a fundamentally positive attitude to European integration. But at the same time, they have an ever-increasing feeling that something is going wrong, that an un-transparent, complex, intricate, mammoth institution has evolved, divorced from the factual problems and national traditions, grabbing ever greater competencies and areas of power; that the democratic control mechanisms are failing: in brief, that it cannot go on like this” On the 1st December 2009 last the Lisbon Treaty finally entered into force representing the end of the long and tortured adoption process. It was and will remain an important day in European history, but yet it passed relatively unnoticed; in stark contrast to the emotions raised throughout its ratification process. The polemic caused by the manner of the Treaty’s ratification is significant and has without question damaged the image of the European Union. This is true not only for those citizens who actually voted against its ratification but also more generally as citizens have been forced to accept that the European Union is moving towards “ever greater union” , whether they like it or not. Now that the Treaty is finally in place, it is perhaps interesting to briefly recall the process that has brought the European Union to this place and to ask if the end result has for once justified the means. It is proposed to first recall the circumstances leading to the adoption of the Treaty (A), before going on to consider its rejection at ratification stage by successive French, Dutch and Irish voters (B).

Boom and bust: Economic voting in Ireland

The global economic crisis presents new challenges for economic voting models. While there is a consensus that economic voting exists, even the most ardent supporters agree that it is a variable force and can only explain a portion of voting behaviour. This article investigates the impact of positive and negative economic performance on voting patterns. The idea that voters are more likely to punish governments for poor economic performance, the grievance asymmetry hypothesis, has found some empirical support, but in their comprehensive review of the economic voting literature, Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier concluded that the evidence of asymmetric economic voting was, at best, mixed. Ireland presents a clear test of the grievance asymmetric economic vote with recent elections taking place against backdrops of some of the highest economic growth rates in the world and then one of the most spectacular economic crashes. We demonstrate that economic shocks matter a great deal; Irish voters like their counterparts elsewhere in crisis hit states are unforgiving. Furthermore, the electoral change at the 2011 election in Ireland was extreme and challenges the consensus that economic voting is a small force.

Political Transformation in Ireland: Boom, Bust, and Beyond*

Political Transformation in Ireland:Boom, Bust, and Beyond* Theresa Reidy (bio) and Timothy J. White (bio) Ireland's journey from the booming Celtic Tiger economy to a poor man of Europe was based primarily on a property boom and bust that made international headlines from 2008 to 2011. The country's financial collapse, while prompted by unique Irish causes and circumstances, was rooted in the global financial crisis that especially affected several European states and was linked to the U.S. financial crisis and contraction. Ireland had experienced a period of rapid economic growth in the late 1990s, based on impressive productivity gains from investment in information technology, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. In the early 2000s speculation in housing led to a property bubble or a "confidence trap." Martin Wolf claims that economic theorists should be considered culpable for their inability to predict or explain financial crises like the one that came to Ireland and many other states in 2008.1 But we contend that the financial crisis was as much political as it was economic. One must appreciate the political circumstances that allowed and perhaps encouraged the kind of financial speculation that brought on the crisis. David Runciman's theory about advanced democracies suggests that these types of governments muddle from crisis to crisis, and this tendency explains the confidence that the Irish possessed as their economy boomed on the back of a property bubble in the early 2000s. Oblivious to this confidence trap, Irish government policies tended to facilitate the economic bubble rather than to heed warnings of an inevitable [End Page 101] correction in the housing market.2 The confidence trap might also explain the lack of more significant protest behavior, as Irish voters were quite ready to wait for elections to indicate their dissatisfaction with the fiscal-retrenchment policies that came in the wake of the bust.3 This article documents the economic policies that led to the boom and also addresses the policies that have been enacted by successive Irish governments to respond to the economic crisis that emerged in 2008. We contend that the economic crisis has fractured the party cartel that has governed Ireland since independence. The politics of how the Irish government created and reacted to the financial crisis can best be understood through an examination of Ireland's unusual recent economic history and of contemporary politics in both the domestic and the European Union arenas.4 While Ireland's own policies played a critical role in its economic successes and failures, the integration of national economies within the euro area created a tug and pull within Europe. This factor can most easily be seen in the difference between creditor and debtor states. Ireland joined the latter category after its financial crash. Germany, as the principal creditor state in Europe, dealt incrementally with the burgeoning debt crisis. This meant that the economic institutions created to facilitate an integration of European economies managed the economic crisis but did not solve it.5 For the Irish, their financial collapse meant a bailout by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in late 2010. These three institutions, known as the troika, [End Page 102] defined the means by which the Irish could access the capital necessary to finance their burgeoning debt and deficit. For many in Ireland, having these institutions control Irish economic policy signified a loss of sovereignty and marked a new nadir in Irish political and economic life. A few short months after the negotiations that brought Ireland to its knees in December 2010, the Fianna Fáil government was replaced in an election in February 2011 that was the third most volatile in Western Europe since the Second World War.6 The crushing defeat of the dominant Fianna Fáil party in the 2011 general election created new dynamics in the party system.7 The coalition government of Fine Gael and Labour that came to power had the largest governing majority in the Dáil in the history of the state. After several years of higher taxes and frozen or reduced public services and spending, the Irish economy began to recover, and by 2015 it...

Understanding the 2015 marriage referendum in Ireland: context, campaign, and conservative Ireland

ABSTRACTOn 22 May 2015 the marriage referendum proposal was passed by a large majority of Irish voters and the definition of marriage in the constitution was broadened to introduce marriage equality. This referendum is remarkable for a number of reasons: (1) it is uniquely based on an experiment in deliberative democracy; (2) the referendum campaign was unusually vigorous and active; and (3) the voting patterns at the referendum point to a significant value shift along the deep seated liberal conservative political cleavage of Irish politics. This article provides an overview of the background to the referendum initiative, the campaign prior to the referendum, and the key factors that drove voter turnout and preference. Based on a post-referendum survey, we find that while support for the government of the day, political knowledge, and social attitudes have the same effects as commonly found in other referendums, the variation among social classes was less prevalent than usual and door-to-door canvassing by the two sides of the campaign impacted through turnout rather than vote preference. The voting behaviour of the different age groups suggests strong generational effects.

Political knowledge and campaign effects in the 2008 Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty

This article makes a distinction between the attitude component of campaigns and the knowledge component and argues that a campaign that influences knowledge of a proposal can be quite successful in influencing the vote. On June 12th 2008 Irish voters voted against ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. Perceptions, and especially misperceptions, of the Treaty played an important role in the referendum. The campaign focused in particular on influencing voters' perceptions of, rather than attitudes towards the Treaty. This article examines the interaction between knowledge, campaigns, and perceptions of the Treaty, in the referendum.

The geography of Irish voter turnout: A case study of the 2002 General Election

Turnout' is a key measure of participation in the democratic process. Specifically, it measures the proportion of eligible voters that turns out to vote on election day. Low (or declining) turnout rates are a cause of concern and are often taken as a measure of disaffection with the political decision-making process. In Ireland, turnout in the 2002 general election confirmed a downward trend in voter participation and represented the lowest turnout since the foundation of the State. However, turnout rates vary markedly across the State. Until recently, it was not possible to examine turnout at a sufficiently detailed geographical scale to allow systematic analysis of the potential causes of such variations. This paper reports on a joint project, involving the Geary Institute, UCD and the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA), NUI Maynooth, that is undertaking a comprehensive analysis of turnout in the 2002 general election at the lowest possible level of aggregation. Here, a cartographic description and introductory analysis is presented that includes the first ever electoral-district-level map of turnout. The resulting geographical patterns are generally coherent and explicable and provide important pointers for future research. In an unanticipated finding, this map shows that the phenomenon of low turnout in urban areas occurs beyond the main cities and their suburbanised hinterlands and shows up as a characteristic of most provincial towns.

Bicameralism in the Republic of Ireland: The Seanad Abolition Referendum

Scholars of comparative politics have long pondered the significance of whether parliament is constitutionally comprised of one chamber (unicameral) or two chambers (bicameral). Empirically, around two-thirds of democratic political systems in the world today operate with a unicameral legislature (Heller and Branduse 2014). Moreover, the degree to which each chamber in a bicameral system is politically significant varies greatly (Lijphart 2012). Ultimately, the cameral structure of the legislature has been found to have important consequence (Tsebelis and Money 1997). The Irish Constitution of 1937 specified a bicameral system comprising a directly elected lower chamber (Dail Eireann) and a less powerful, partly-appointed, partly indirectly elected, upper chamber (Seanad Eireann). In a referendum held on October 4th 2013, voters in the Irish Republic were given the opportunity to abolish Seanad Eireann (hereafter the Seanad). With a turnout of 39.17 percent, and by a margin of 42,500 ballots, the proposal to abolish the upper chamber at the next general election was rejected by 51.7 percent of those voting. What was meant to have been a populist centrepiece of political reform for the governing coalition ultimately produced a surprising outcome: Irish voters, despite being heavily disillusioned with the political system and political elites in the midst of a major economic crisis, voted to retain bicameralism.

Mediating Elections in Ireland: Empirical Evidence from the 2011 General Election

Information is a crucial ingredient in election campaigns. When voters form or change opinions they are widely thought to do so on the basis of information, attention to the information, predispositions, and the interaction of these (Zaller 1992). And voters usually receive most political information, or at least most intensely, during the course of an election campaign. So campaigns should lead to voters reinforcing or changing opinions, which in turn may lead to changes in the vote choice, and this should happen primarily through the media. However, such general arguments may have a limited application to Ireland; politicians may be able to influence voters’ decisions unmediated by news outlets because of the small size of constituencies. A majority of Irish voters are likely to receive direct contact from parties (55 percent according to the Irish National Election Study (INES) 2011), most often in the form of door-to-door canvassing. Furthermore, decisions might be made before the campaign starts; in 2002 and 2007 71 and 69 percent of respondents, respectively, reported that they had made their decision as to which party to give their first preference vote to before the campaign officially started (own analysis of INES 2002-2007).

Electing Women to the Dáil: Gender Cues and the Irish Voter

At no time in history has the number of women elected to Dáil Éireann surpassed 14 per cent of the total membership. In spite of significant social changes, the use of a proportional electoral system and no obvious bias among voters, the number of female TDs remains stubbornly low by international standards. This paper examines why, if the prospects for women's election are relatively good, so few women end up in public office. Using both aggregate and survey data, the issues of incumbency advantage, the electorate's attitudes and the candidates' differing experiences of the political process are explored. The evidence suggests that, all else equal, female candidates have as good a chance of being elected as their male counterparts, and the real difficulties in achieving equitable representation lie elsewhere, in the candidate emergence and nomination stages of the election game.

Assessing the Irish General Election of 2011: A Roundtable

Assessing the Irish General Election of 2011:A Roundtable Sean Farrell, Ciara Meehan, Gary Murphy, and Kevin Rafter On February 25, 2011, Irish voters went to the polls to elect the members of the 31st assembly of Dáil Éireann, who would in turn form a new government. Given the devastation of the Irish economy and the controversial bank bailout and subsequent intervention by the International Monetary Fund a few months before, it surprised no one that Fianna Fáil was swept from power. Even so, there was a consensus that the change in the Irish political landscape was one of historic dimensions. Commentators fumbled for comparisons; some likened the results to the 1918 elections, when Sinn Féin demolished the Irish Parliamentary Party, while others compared it to 1932, when Fianna Fáil first assumed power and stayed there for most of the next eighty years. Whatever the eventual ranking of history may be, the February results were unprecedented in modern Irish history. New Hibernia Review has convened a roundtable of historians and political scientists to sift through the contexts, and the possible consequences, of the 2011 election. The four scholars whose remarks appear below conducted their "conversation" by e-mail in June and July 2011. —The Editors Sean Farrell: To an overwhelming degree, post-election commentary has characterized the general election of 2011 as a referendum on Fianna Fáil's poor management of the Irish economy. Writing in the Guardian, for example, the historian Diarmaid Ferriter asserted that the election was the Irish people's revenge against a government that "put banks before the people, and the people will be paying the price for decades." Was this election really "just" about the economy? Were their other critical factors involved? Gary Murphy: I think it reasonable to postulate that the February 2011 Irish general election was dominated by the economy. Compare Fianna Fáil's historic low polling numbers of anywhere between 12 and 16 percent in the month leading up to the election with their numbers prior to the historic bank guarantee scheme of September 2008. In the May 2007 election, Fianna Fáil received 42 percent of the vote. A TNS MRBI poll taken in June 2008 showed them at 42 [End Page 36] percent while a Red C poll in July 2008 had them at 40 percent. Another Red C poll taken on September 21, a week before the famous bank guarantee scheme, had them at 36 percent—still a full 8 percent ahead of Fine Gael. However, once the bank guarantee scheme was enacted and the consequences of that decision began to become apparent, support for Fianna Fáil plummeted to a degree never witnessed before. The first TNS MRBI poll after the guarantee had Fianna Fáil at 27 percent—a gargantuan drop of 15 percent, from which it would never recover. The first Red C poll, taken in late October 2008, had them at 26 percent. Once it became clear throughout 2009 that the bailout of the banks and the establishment of the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) were not the panacea for the Irish economy that they had been portrayed by Fianna Fáil as being, it simply became a question of how low Fianna Fáil would go. It should be noted, however, that in the years between the general elections of 2007 and 2011 Ireland witnessed a series of events that no one possibly could have anticipated. When Fianna Fáil won their third general election in a row in 2007, they did so by promising to continue the same economic policies that had brought such political success. By the time the government fell in January 2011, the Irish people had witnessed Taoiseach Bertie Ahern resign from office under the significant cloud of the Mahon Tribunal; the Progressive Democrats go out of existence; the government first lose, and then win, an EU treaty referendum; the state bail out the banks by guaranteeing all their deposits and obligations, probably the most momentous political decision taken by any government since the foundation of the state; the country enter a severe and prolonged recession; and the EU and IMF come to the...

Voting for government coalitions in Ireland under single transferable vote

This paper addresses the issue of whether voters indicate a preference for a government rather than, or in addition to a preference for a party, when they cast a ballot under the system of the single transferable vote (STV). It thus contributes to the existing literature on strategic coalition voting by examining whether coalition preferences matter where electors are given the option to rank the parties in order of preference. The question then becomes: does this ranking reflect or signal a coalition preference? Using survey data from two Irish elections, this paper finds that whereas first preferences are closely aligned with coalition choices, Irish voters do not systematically use second preferences to express a view on their preferred coalition formation.

The Immediate Aftermath of the ‘Yes’ Vote in Ireland to the Treaty of Lisbon

Irish voters may well have gone to the polls on October 2, 2009 with the impression that their vote would ‘make or break’ the Lisbon Treaty. The Irish electorate certainly had the power to break the Treaty. A ‘no’ vote would have finished the Lisbon Treaty and done irreparable damage to the EU reform process. But the Irish vote did not guarantee of itself that the Lisbon Treaty would survive. The reason for this lay in the fact that the Lisbon Treaty needed to be ratified by all 27 member states. Two recalcitrants remained - Poland and the Czech Republic. Their parliaments had actually already approved Lisbon - but their presidents had withheld their signatures.