Voting in a vacuum? 
Since the Crotty judgment of the Supreme Court in 1987, all new EU treaties automatically go to public vote in a referendum. But there is no independent organ of State that is charged with responsibility for determining whether the new treaty is compatible with the Irish Constitution or not. This creates a vacuum. The Supreme Court can only decide if a case is referred to it, as it did in the past when Raymond Crotty and Patricia McKenna took their cases.

Defaulting to "resistance mode"
So, as happened with Nice 1, the public are left to sort it out for themselves. It's like a jury being asked to decide on a case without hearing the arguments of legal counsel. This could be taken as a spur to participative democracy. Research the issues yourself and discuss them with your neighbour! Why not? It's a good idea, but you'd want to be highly motivated! In the absence of authoritative arguments, people can begin to fear something is being "put over on them" and may be tempted default into resistance mode.

Populist fears
In such a vacuum, groups with an entirely different agenda can intrude all kinds of irrelevancies to prey on populist fears and fudge the real issues. Something like this has been happening in the earlier weeks of the debate.

A "godless" treaty?
One group called CÓIR - Lisbon Treaty Information Campaign has issued a so-called "Catholic Voters' Guide", making much of the fact that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict expressed reservations about there being no explicit invocation of God in the preamble to the Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe.

However, I know that many Catholics, and even some bishops, feel happy that the Lisbon Treaty preamble, states:

"Drawing  inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable right of the human person, democracy, equality, freedom and the  rule of law...."

This is certainly not against religion, but is an implicit and quite respectful recognition of the role of religion. It also invokes a common heritage and sets a context, a framework, in which Jews, Christians, Muslims, as well as people of other religions and none, can co-operate in drawing up legislation that is just, inclusive, participative and respectful.

What the Lisbon Treaty will not do
A useful list of things the Lisbon Treaty will not do is given by Gavin Barrett, Senior Lecture in Law at UCD in an article in the May-June 2008 Doctrine and Life:

An extraordinary and quite inaccurate range of allegations have been levelled at the Treaty of Lisbon in the course of the current referendum campaign. It is worth refuting some of them here. The Lisbon Treaty will not end Irish neutrality. Nor will it, as has been claimed, end Ireland's foreign direct investment policies. Neither will it endanger Irish control of its corporate taxation policy. It will not facilitate the legalisation of abortion or get rid of the legally binding Protocol on abortion agreed at Maastricht in 1992. It will not introduce mechanisms to make Treaties capable of amendment without reference to the Irish government or the Oireachtas. The Treaty is not responsible for ending the situation in which each state sends a permanent commissioner to Brussels. And the new voting arrangements in the Treaty will not prevent Ireland from defending its interests in a manner similar to that in which it has done in the past (1).

What the Lisbon Treaty positively will do
The best summary I have seen of what the Lisbon Treaty positively will do is the little booklet entitled EU Reform Treaty dropped into my letter box a few days ago and available on the web http://www.reformtreaty.ie/. It introduces the treaty, explaining what it is, why and how it was negotiated and why we are holding a referendum about it now.

It then discusses briefly six main provisions of the treaty:

• increased democratic control - through the national and European parliaments and through a citizens' initiative;
• how the working of the EU institutions will be affected by the treaty;
• future amendments, new policy areas and the changes as regards majority and unanimous voting;
• the charter of citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms;
• the EU's external role - common foreign and security policy, the developing world, and the appointment of an EU High Representative; and 
• how "equality" is worked out between the 27 member states.

The full text is available online at http://europa.eu/lisbon_treaty/full_text/index_en.htm. It is not always easy to find out what exactly is going to happen. Lisbon and the series of treaties that led to it are a praiseworthy, but complex, project, whose aim is to put participative democracy into effect. From what I have read, I personally did not have the sense of a subversive expansion of European powers as suggested by the CÓIR "Catholic Voters' Guide".

Two unanswered questions
However, I do have two questions to which I didn't feel I got satisfactory answers.

1. The Charter of Rights and the European Court of Justice
 The Charter of Rights and how it is interpreted by the European Court of Justice gets very little clarification in the EU Reform Treaty booklet. That is a pity.

I think the more rights you put into a document, the more power you give to unelected judges and lawyers. Is that good democracy? In this respect, I can appreciate some of the sense of panic evoked by CÓIR's mention of  expanding "equality legislation", "reproductive rights", and so on. But, on the other hand, one could ask whether there is equally the possibility of an expanding of "rights" by judges, lawyers, and court decisions in Ireland.

2. The Declaration 17 concerning Primacy
The second unanswered question is the Declaration 17 concerning Primacy, which seems to state "that the treaties and the law adopted by the EU on the basis of the treaties have primacy over the law of member States, under the conditions laid down by the said case law".

I'm not at all clear what this means. Some say it is a principle of international law that national Constitutions are not subservient to international law and that the Charter simply codifies decisions taken either by the European Court of Justice or by national governments or referenda in the past. Is the Protocol to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 safeguarding the The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which was overwhelmingly passed in 1983, recognising the right to life of the unborn as equal to the right to life of the mother (The Irish Constitution art 40.3.3) an example of such a decision by a national government? I suspect it is.

But if it is not, then what does this Declaration 17 concerning Primacy mean? Can any one authoritatively spell it out?