The whole campaign was simply funny, in that the politicians forgot that they were dealing with Irish people, and Irish people by nature don’t like to be railroaded or pushed into anything. It’s their character, thank God, and they make up their own minds of what is right and wrong. Just like stubborn pigs, if you push the rare species of the Irish man in a certain direction hard enough, he is sure to go in the exact opposite direction!

I can’t understand why Brian Cowen didn’t come out and say “if we vote “yes” this will happen, and if we vote “no”, we will be fine as well”. What came across to me was that we had a leader who had no Plan B. If we voted “no”, then we were f*cked for evermore. That was the message from the campaign. It wasn’t just Brian Cowen either – all of the politicians with a few exceptions were saying the same.

One part of this was to get it ratified, which was their aim, but they made a balls of it. And had they handled it better, I’m sure they would have got it ratified – but I’m personally glad that they didn’t get it ratified. I believe in bringing people together in any common good direction, but it must be common. We all have different cultures in the EU, and while there are a lot of things we should and do share for the common good, we should not get so close that we end up with a situation where we lose control of our way of handling situations – whatever they may be.

If we had a European president, an EU minister for defence and an EU minister for foreign affairs representing us on the world stage, why would we need an Irish government? Then our politicians could hide behind the EU – which they do sometimes any way.

Now, all of the politicians are thinking of how we move forward from here and the tone is between the lines “can we change something legally to move on” or “can we try to sell this again in some other watered down way?” It’s all the EU politicians are thinking like this, not just the Irish. This is very simple. 27 countries had to ratify this treaty for it to be passed and one has not. Scrap it and get on with running your countries thinking positively forward. Brian Cowen should have told the Irish people in a very confident way during the campaign, if the irish people voted “no”, he will be very happy to move forward and knows how to move forward, given that situation. What he did do was tell the people that we are f*cked if we voted “no”, and he doesn’t know where to go from there and tried to bully them into voting “yes”. Bad move, Sir, when it was your first big challenge as leader! As I said, you forgot we are stubborn Irish people…

On the positive side, I’m very glad and proud that we were the only nation of the 27 countries that were given the opportunity to vote at all on the treaty, and very proud of the outcome. As I said, there are a lot of opportunities to work together with the other 26 countries of the EU, and any other country outside those 26 as well, for the common good of all, but we, as a nation, fought for nearly 800 years to get our independence with massive loss of life and hardship, and to sign any part of that away with the stroke of a pen would be madness, and a complete insult to those who lost everything for us to get where we are today. While we are a small nation, we are also a strong friendly nation that is well able to paddle our own kanoo, and all of our politicians should believe that, whoever they are.

Irish people don’t like to be sold anything, they like to buy things!!! A very simple example of that is on the street outside Charlie´s. PRs are put on the steet to bring people into bars and they are having the exact opposite effect as we all know – but hopefully not for long more.

Time for breakfast.