Rock star, poet join Intel, Ryanair to back Lisbon Treaty

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Lisbon Treaty supporters argue that Ireland could not risk signalling it was becoming detached from Europe; the country’s economy is shrinking 7.5 percent.

Musicians, sports stars and a Nobel Prize-winning writer united with executives and politicians to persuade the Irish to push through the European Union’s new governing agreement and reverse their rejection last year.

U2 guitarist The Edge, poet Seamus Heaney and the captains of the Irish soccer and rugby teams championed the “Yes” cause ahead of the successful October 2 referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, which gave the European Parliament a greater say in policymaking.

They joined Ryanair Holdings Plc chief executive officer Michael O’Leary and the head of Intel Corp’s local unit.

“We’re at a really significant crossroads,” Jim O’Hara, general manager at chipmaker Intel on the outskirts of Dublin, said in an interview.

“The rest of the world is looking at Ireland now.” O’Hara said previously that in the failed June 2008 vote “like many others, I stood back and didn’t speak up.”

Prime Minister Brian Cowen said this month Ireland was enduring some of the most critical days in 87 years since winning independence from the UK, as it tries to drag itself out of a financial crisis that has crippled what was once western Europe’s most dynamic economy.

The government presented its plan on September 16 to spend €54bn ($79 bn) buying real estate loans from banks saddled with bad debt. Following the Lisbon vote, attention will now turn to the 2010 budget in December. Ireland’s deficit is running at three times wider than the EU’s guidelines.

“One lesson of the first campaign was that the standing of political parties wasn’t sufficient for the vote to be carried on their recommendation alone,” said Noel Whelan, a former adviser to Cowen’s Fianna Fail party. “Everybody from the heads of high-profile tech companies to rugby champions called for a ‘Yes’ this time.”

But the victory came at some considerable cost. Intel spent “several hundred thousand” euros on newspaper and outdoor advertising advocating a “Yes” vote, O’Hara said. Ryanair, Europe’s largest discount airline, spent €500,000 on its campaign.

O’Leary, who clashed with the EU over the blocking of its bid for Irish rival Aer Lingus Group Plc, went head-to-head with Declan Ganley, leader of Libertas, which headed the campaign against the treaty last year.

The two appeared in televised debates and Ryanair also added a slogan to one of its Boeing 737s urging a “Yes” vote.

Intel, which is fighting a €1.06-bn EU antitrust fine, and Ryanair were trying to “curry favour” with the EU, said Ganley. “There is something in it for them,” he said in Dublin on September 21. “There is nothing in it for us.”

The Lisbon Treaty might lessen Ireland’s tax-setting powers and damage the economy, Ganley said. O’Leary called Ganley a “failed politician” and said that opposing the treaty wouldn’t create a single job.

“To me, even the notion that one could ‘curry favour’ with the European legal system shows how out of touch these nonsensical accusations are with reality,” O’Hara said.

The treaty endows the 27-member EU with a full-time president and foreign minister, reduces the size of the majority needed to pass some laws and hands the parliament more power.

Lisbon supporters argued that Ireland could not risk signalling that it was becoming detached from Europe.

The economy is shrinking about 7.5 percent, and it would be worse had Ireland not adopted the euro, the treaty’s supporters say.

Ireland for Europe, an independent campaign group, enlisted about 40 “patrons,” including The Edge, to put weight behind the push for a “Yes” vote.

Brian O’Driscoll, captain of Ireland’s grand-slam winning rugby team, attended a Lisbon night at a bar in Dublin organised by the group, the Irish Times reported on September 22. Heaney composed a poem to celebrate the expansion of the EU during Ireland’s presidency in 2004.

“There are many reasons for ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, reasons to do with our political and economic wellbeing,” Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995, said in a video posted on the Ireland for Europe Web site. “The poem mainly speaks for our honour and identity as Europeans.”

Seeking to lessen its dependence on the UK, Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973.

Over the next 25 years, Ireland received a total of €62bn of aid and subsidies from Europe. From July 1998 to January 1999, when Ireland joined the euro zone, its benchmark interest rate fell by more than half to three percent and foreign investment flowed in.

“Europe has been good to us over the years,” said Robert Hamilton, 46, a barman speaking in Dublin’s city center, who backed the treaty after abstaining last year. “They need high-profile people to publicise it.”

At a Fianna Fail conference this month, Cowen asked voters not to use the referendum to vent their anger with the government’s handling of the economy.

While O’Hara has said it wasn’t “typical” for a corporation to intervene in a political matter, the Lisbon win would help secure investment and keep the country afloat while non- EU members like Iceland faced bankruptcy. Santa Clara, California-based Intel, the world’s largest semi-conductor maker, employs 4,500 people in Ireland.

“The joke is that the difference between Iceland and Ireland is six months and one letter,” said O’Hara. “The reality is that it’s two letters: EU. That’s the difference.”

This article is courtesy of Bloomberg.

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