I had been bombarded with so much literature and no clear talking on the Lisbon referendum, as I’m sure everyone else reading this has been too, that my head was in a tizzy and I was not sure who to believe any more. I decided I’d have to inform myself in order to vote responsibly on Thursday next.

First of all I realised that too many people were going to vote “No” because they wanted to register discontent with domestic policies. But guess what guys this is not a local election where we can afford to send a warning shot across the bows and watch government take heed. There is too much riding on the outcome if we are going to keep our place in the EU.

As I read everything I could lay my hands on about the referendum it became clear to me that the “Yes” campaigners have been singularly inept and the “No” campaigners have capitalised on that. Did this make them right? I discovered that they were not totally honest in their claims – in fact misinformation seems to be the name of their game. Whether they were actually lying to the electorate counting on us to be too lazy to do the maths for ourselves or were just plain inept themselves is something I haven’t been able to work out. Neither brings much credit to the “No” campaign. And why the hell are the “Yes” campaigners not countering the obvious inaccuracies? Are they so hide-bound by the local rural political divides that they cannot see past the end of their noses? Ever heard of “divide and conquer”?

One of the “No” posters I’ve seen around is threatening us with the loss of our Commissioner. What it doesn’t tell us that the big countries will now have the exact same terms as the smaller ones as regards commissioners – we will all be in the same boat – seems pretty fair to me.

Tax harmonisation seems to be another big issue with the “No” vote – we were going to lose our low corporate tax rate if we voted “Yes” they claimed but there are actually safeguards in the treaty to protect our low corporate tax rate. The Libertas group has been preaching that other EU members would gang up on us to challenge our rate but the only way they could do this is to trash the Treaty of Rome – go figure!! But it seems to me that being part of Europe is vital to us if we want to safeguard ourselves against the new threat from the US who are looking at getting their share of profits earned by US companies abroad.

Neither will Lisbon force NATO membership on us any more than previous EU treaties did, although I seem to remember this being a favourite chant of the “anti” lobby then.

On the plus side our government will actually be able to Veto EU legislation and it seems to me that Irish citizens will actually have more voting power in this than those of bigger countries because of our PR system.

 All in all it seems to me that we will gain more than we will lose by voting “Yes”.