Tears and tantrums at Lisbon hearings

TEARS, tantrums, treason and a dramatic walkout all featured in the second last day of meetings for the Dáil committee charged with finding a solution to the Lisbon treaty dilemma.

Members of the Oireachtas sub-committee on Ireland’s future in the EU will hold their final meetings today following an intensive six-week programme.

At their second last meeting yesterday, broadcaster Eamon Dunphy suggested there was not enough passion or emotion in the Lisbon debate, but for committee members, the opposite was true.

Earlier yesterday, tough-talking businessman Bill Cullen appeared to start crying as he remembered when “children didn’t even have shoes on their feet”.

He stopped and cleared his throat before adding that the EU has been so good to the Irish people who rejected the Lisbon treaty in a referendum last June.

Mr Dunphy, who opposed the Lisbon treaty, joked that he did have shoes on his feet when he was small but he got a pair of Guccis for his dinner in the Shelbourne Hotel last week with Declan Ganley from no campaign group, Libertas.

Another guest, Newstalk presenter and rugby pundit, George Hook added: “If Eamon ever went to school without his boots it can only be because he was too big for them”.

Earlier in the morning, representatives from COIR — a group who strongly opposed the Lisbon treaty — stormed out of the meeting just ten minutes after arriving.

COIR’s Richard Greene and Niamh Uí Bhrian consistently shouted at committee members who they said were guilty of treason for not declaring the treaty dead.

“This brazen effrontery and blatant denial of democracy shows the contempt in which the political parties hold the people. Suppressing the sovereign will of the people in such a fashion would be an act of treason, the likes of which has not been seen since the Act of Union,” said Mr Greene.

Committee members said afterwards they had never before seen the Oireachtas treated with such contempt.

Labour’s Joe Costello said COIR had only come for an “argy bargy” while Fine Gael’s Lucinda Creighton said it was “an orchestrated PR exercise, cynically designed to grab attention.”

Mr Cullen, head of Renault Ireland, compared selling the Lisbon treaty to selling a car. “How do you get people to do something? You get them to want to do it, I’ve said this on the Apprentice” he said, referring to his TV3 programme.

He also criticised campaign posters with pictures of politicians telling people they must vote yes.

“You missed out on getting people in the public arena to support the Lisbon treaty,” he said. “Who came out to support Barack Obama? Oprah first and then Caroline Kennedy. Maybe you need some face out there in the campaign”.

Mr Hook quipped that “if there’s one group less credible than politicians it’s second-hand car dealers”.

He said the Lisbon treaty cannot be sold to the Irish people in the same way again: “There has to be a different salesman and you have to dress the message up a different way. You can’t sell the same thing again.”

In its final meeting today, the committee will hear from former Socialist TD, Joe Higgins, who yesterday announced his intention to contest a seat in Dublin in next year’s elections to the European Parliament.

The committee will present their recommendations to the Government next week.