So, a glorious 2nd place. I’m only happy that we’ve managed to beat the French. Sarkozy was arrogantly sure that they will ratify before anyone else does. Wanting to be first is intellectually questionable in the first place. This is no Olympic games, you don’t win by doing it first.
So, ratification done in the parliament, the option of holding a referendum was dismissed. There was a wide agreement that the Treaty should be ratified, with some political parties from the opposition complaining there was no debate with the public on the matter. And indeed, there was nothing. Nothing. Sure, Slovenia is currently chairing the EU, which makes the EU omnipresent anyway. This would be the only reason why I could tolerate the absence of any information campaign. But of course I won’t, I think it’s a shame.
Plus, we still don’t have official consolidated versions of the Treaty. It’s a monster left intentionally unreadable. So, here you have some semi-official versions and some freelance versions (English, French, German):
http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/FCO_PDF_CM7310_ConsolidatedTreaties.pdf
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/pdf/rap-info/i0439.pdf
http://www.mwalther.net/europa/Unionsrecht-Lissabon-MWalther.pdf
I know no one will enjoy reading them. But you can print the stuff and if you work with the EU as a professional, you can then look for the right Article. You can compare these versions with the official one from the Council website:
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/showPage.asp?id=1296〈=en
I’m the first in line to see the institutional question closed. But with a bit of decency. The Constitution failed in 2005 in two referendums. What the subsequent IGC did is strip it of the most “contested elements” (supremacy of EU law, competition, symbols…) and re-packaged it in an unreadable format calling it Lisbon Treaty. The strategy now is to ratify it as soon as possible, with as little public debate as possible. This comes with a reasoning. The governments are not confident enough to win an open debate on Europe with their publics. This worries me, as much as makes the Eurosceptics happy.
Things are looking less than perfect in Ireland. I still hope the Treaty gets through though, because a second failure would symbolically kill a stronger EU for the next decades.