With a heavy heart, Ireland has voted to accept the eurozone fiscal pact in the hope that it will win them bailout money if the economy crashes again.
There was no dancing in the streets, no bunting and no fireworks as the official tellers announced that the Irish had approved the pact by a margin of about 60.3 per cent to 39.7 per cent. Half the 3.1 million electorate did not cast a ballot at all in the referendum, many of them apparently convinced that they were being offered a choice between two kinds of austerity.
”When will we know if we lost or if we lost ?” asked Allan Cavanagh, the Galway cartoonist. “No” voter Lucy Carty, from Roscommon in western Ireland, wanted to know: ”Do our shackles come in child-size or shall I just buy their air fares now?” In Dublin, the joke going the rounds was that the result was Rock: 58 per cent; Hard Place: 42 per cent.
Little wonder, then, that Enda Kenny, the Irish Prime Minister, looked only mildly relieved as the results were confirmed from the constituencies across the Republic.
Wilfried Martens, head of the European People’s Party, was the first to send congratulations (”a significant step forward”), but the only truly satisfied politician in Europe was Chancellor Angela Merkel, of Germany, who had feared an Irish rejection of the pact would be part of a three-punch combination.
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An Irish “no” could have encouraged austerity critics in France to consolidate President François Hollande’s power in parliamentary elections and boosted the hopes of the leftist Syriza party in Greece, already set to win the June 17 election there. The cumulative effect could well — and may still — spook the already unsettled markets. In the end, though, the Irish lived up to the description of Paul Krugman, the Great Depression scholar and Nobel Economics laureate, as the ”good soldiers of austerity”.
In part, the “no” vote was eroded by the knowledge that there was no stopping the fiscal pact that imposes tight budget discipline on all eurozone members and threatens penalties for backsliders. The pact needed only the approval of 12 out of 17 eurozone members to become law. ”This train was going to leave the station whether we liked it or not,” said Michael Marsh, a political scientist from Trinity College Dublin.
One reason for Mr Kenny’s glumness may have been the fact that the referendum has made Sinn Fein and its leader Gerry Adams the chief platform for austerity opponents. Despite being on the losing side of the referendum, his star is now likely to rise and there are already those who are tipping him as a future prime minister.
A breakdown of voting patterns showed that “no” voters predominated in poorer, working-class areas; fiscal pact supporters came mainly from more prosperous city suburbs. In other words, as one commentator noted, those most affected by austerity policies voted “no”, while those about to be affected by austerity policies voted “yes”.
It was all rather confusing, admitted Joan Burton, Minister for Social Protection. ”I met unhappy ‘yes’ voters and unhappy ‘no’ voters,” she said. But the clinching argument for the pact, she said, was ”I do not want Ireland to go down the Greek road.”
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The result of a “yes” vote, said Mr Kenny, the Prime Minister, was that Ireland could now be sure of support from the European Stability Mechanism if the country — now slowly recovering, albeit with huge levels of debt — should stumble. That would boost the confidence of investors and create jobs. It would, he said, help the country borrow normally again on bond markets by next year. But only a few hundred yards from where he delivered his muted victory statement, a billboard still bore an image of Angela Merkel and a quotation from her. ”The debt brakes will be binding and valid for ever”, said the Merkel quotation on the “vote no” poster. ”Never will you be able to change them through a parliamentary majority.”