FF accused of Lisbon trickery

FIANNA FÁIL has been accused of attempting to secure a yes vote in any future Lisbon referendum by ensuring Government receives more airtime on the matter than its opposition rivals.

In a statement yesterday, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Constitution said it has opened a review into how information is provided to the public during referendum campaigns.

In particular, the committee is to focus on television coverage during June’s Lisbon referendum, after claims that the attention paid to the no campaign gave it more credibility and less scrutiny than was deserved.

Committee chairman and Fianna Fáil TD Sean Ardagh said the review would be “an invaluable opportunity to consider all the factors” impacting on the referendum, adding that the conclusions of the investigation would subsequently be voted on by Oireachtas members, leading to potential reform of the current coverage process. Hitting out at the move, opposition parties which sided with the no campaign claimed the investigation was a smoke-screen to allow the Government to “widen the referendum goalposts for themselves”.

Claiming that both the Coughlan judgment of 2000 and the earlier McKenna judgment, both of which guarantee a 50-50 balance of views in referendum and election coverage, were under threat, they said Fianna Fáil was effectively “taking a leaf from the George W Bush manual on winning elections”.