No gift or gab in this Irish statement

They said “No” to the European Union’s new constitution, the only holdout and the one vote that could bring the thing down.

“It looks like this will be a No vote,” Mr Ahern said on live television. “At the end of the day, for a myriad of reasons, the people have spoken.”

Everything rode on that vote, for the EU.

European leaders earlier said they had no “plan B” for how to proceed if Ireland’s electorate voted No.

Declan Ganley of the anti-treaty lobby group Libertas said that if the No vote had indeed triumphed that it was “a great day for Ireland”.

“The people of Ireland have shown enormous courage and wisdom in analysing the facts presented to them and making the decision they have,” Mr Ganley said.

Which was tough, given the intentional complexity of the dense Lisbon Treaty wording.

[Importantly], the Lisbon treaty’s claims to democratic legitimacy are already threadbare. The Lisbon text is a reworking of an earlier attempt to create a constitution for the EU. That grandiose project was killed off by votes against it in twin referendums in 2005, in France and the Netherlands. It was no accident that Lisbon was a hard text to read: EU leaders were to be heard crowing last year that they had made it “unintelligible” in order to smuggle it past voters.

Didn’t work in Ireland, because those who voted ‘no’ suspected it meant giving up more national sovereignty, the right of their democracy to elect EU officials and to vote on major policy decisions affecting the member nations and their cultures. Like mandating access to abortion, for instance. Though the ‘yes’ bloc insisted Ireland’s constitution prohibition on abortion would not be affected. The ‘no’ bloc didn’t buy it, or some of their other arguments.

My family was in Dublin just over a week ago, and saw the remarkable impact this pending vote had on that city. Nearly every lampost had multiple signs hanging from them, both for and against the treaty. Taxi drivers talked about it. Walls were plastered with campaign slogans. It seemed the ‘no’ vote was growing by the hour.

This week, it struck me as clearly obvious that when Pope Benedict chose to honor an Irish saint in his Wednesday audience, he was sending a message.

Speaking to tens of thousands of pilgrims in St Peter’s Square, the Pope gave a sermon about the life of St Columbanus, an Irish monk born in 543 who travelled to Europe to spread Christianity.

In his speech charting the saint’s life, Pope Benedict said that Columbanus could be called a “European saint”.

The Pope explained that Columbanus, who was born in Leinster, entered monastic life in Bangor aged 20, before leaving “with 12 companions to begin missionary work on the European continent, where the migration of peoples from the north and the east had caused entire Christian regions to lapse back into paganism”.

You just knew where Benedict was going with this, he’s been so engaged in calling Europe back to its Christian roots.

Pope Benedict described Columbanus as one of the founding “Fathers of Europe”.

“(Columbanus) spent all his energies to nourish the Christian roots of the nascent Europe.

“With his spiritual strength, with his faith, with his love of God and neighbour, he became one of the Fathers of Europe, showing us today the way to those roots from which our continent may be reborn,” he said.