SEÁN McGoldrick, Ard Chomhairle, Republican Sinn Féin and spokesperson on matters relating to the Nice Treaty and membership of the EU said on January 30 that the latest opinion poll on attitudes to the Nice Treaty showed that the media and politicians need to reconsider their attitudes toward the Irish people.

“People were also given a choice of two statements and asked which came closest to their view. Fifty-one per cent (51%) chose the statement that “Ireland should do all it can to unite fully with the EU” while 33% said that “Ireland should do all it can to protect its independence”.

“The above results would seem to hold some good news for the Government, if we assume that they are not in favour of protecting independence. In fact it holds very little, as the other questions in the poll indicate.

“Opinion polls in Ireland have tended to be quite accurate in measuring voting patterns but something seems to be happening which opinion pollsters (and politicians) are as yet unable to measure.

“In the referendum last year the Treaty was defeated by 54% to 46%. In total 34.3% of the electorate voted while 65.7% abstained. Of those who voted 18.5% voted No and 15.8% voted Yes.

“However when the opinion pollsters asked their respondents how they voted last June 24% said they had voted No, 28% had voted Yes, 40% said they did not vote and 8% didn’t answer.

“In fact, if you exclude the people who didn’t answer or who said they didn’t vote, the manner in which the respondents voted is an exact inversion of the actual result: 54% said they voted Yes and 46% said they voted No.

“The poll very clearly overstated the Yes vote last year compared to the No vote, while the number of people who abstained was understated.

“The media analysis of the poll was interesting.

“ ‘Only 40 per cent of respondents acknowledge having abstained in the Nice referendum,’ the Irish Times wrote, ‘whereas we know from the actual results that 65% of the electorate abstained. Adding the 8% don’t knows to the retrospective estimate of abstention still leaves a 17% percentage point discrepancy.’

“The Irish Times felt that the 17-25% discrepancy between the abstention rate last year and how those polled said they voted was the result of “muddled memory” - people who had intended to vote and couldn’t remember that they hadn’t.

“How insulting: The people who turned out to vote last June had to contend with three different referendum papers. “The political analysts seem to think that people trooped from their homes or work to the polling stations on automatic pilot and can’t remember if they got there or not.

“The Irish Times analyst tried to account for the overstated Yes vote (28%) in the poll compared to the Yes vote in the actual referendum (15.8%) by claiming some form of false memory syndrome: people who had intended to vote Yes to the Treaty and didn’t, but thought they had. Here you would have people who would have had the painful memory of juggling with three different referendum papers burned into their memories when in fact they didn’t even vote. Perhaps an alien spacecraft implanted these false memories.

“The Irish Times analyst came to the conclusion that the ‘fact’ that “the recall evidence now favours the Yes side confirms other evidence that there are more potential Yes voters out there than potential No voters and that abstention in June 2001 came disproportionately from the Yes side.”

“Here’s a wild suggestion; it’s not based on pseudo-psychology, re-constructed behaviour, sleep-walking or false memory syndrome: Maybe the pollsters got the sample wrong. Maybe there are in fact more potential No voters out there than there are potential Yes voters. Perhaps there is some new mood among the Irish people that the pollsters have not come to grips with and are not able to sample? How can they if they do not accept it’s there?

“All the evidence we have indicates that there are more potential No voters than Yes voters:

“We have the Referendum result itself;

“We have the fact that the No vote on European Treaties has been consistently rising, Treaty after Treaty;

“We have an ECR survey carried out after the Nice referendum.

“That survey asked people who didn’t vote (presumably they should have been able to remember) what way they would have voted if they had turned out. 21% said they would have voted No and 10% said they would have voted Yes. Sixty-nine per cent (69%) were still undecided.

“So, the majority of people who voted said No to Nice. When people who hadn’t voted were asked by the ECB in retrospect how they would have voted, a majority of those who had an opinion said they would have voted No;

“We should be detecting a pattern here.

“Instead the Irish Times analyst argues that the result of the ECB survey indicates that the ‘cavalry’ is contained among those people who were still undecided at the time of the ECB survey. Since there must be more potential Yes voters out there than No voters, then they must be contained among the people who at the time of the ECB poll were still undecided and by the time of the latest MRBI survey had developed false memory syndrome.

“Also the silent majority of potential Yes voters must be among the people who refuse to attend the mini-Forums on Europe which are on tour around the place. All reports indicate that the majority of ordinary people who attend these mini-Fora are in fact opposed to Nice and have every intention of rejecting it a second, third or fourth time if necessary.

“It is strange that the potential Yes voters do not attend these Fora in greater numbers. It is especially strange since the key-note speaker is invariably an advocate of a Yes vote.

“Here is an alternative interpretation of the poll results. We should assume that the people who voted Yes, No or abstained at the referendum last year know what they did. We should then conclude that the sample of electors we have is not fully representative of the electorate who voted last June since the Yes voters (54%) are over-represented by 12.5%. So, we accept that the poll sample is not representative before we look at how they say they would vote.

“Of the 69% who said they knew how they would vote, 58% said they would vote Yes. This is compared to the 54% of the sample who voted Yes last June.

“So the increase of 4% in Yes people is not exactly spectacular, especially since we would have to allow a substantial margin of error as we know that the sample is disproportionately weighted in favour of the Yes side.

“The latest MRBI poll therefore, doesn’t give any reason for joy among the establishment parties and may raise the question: Why do they seem so determined to ask the people a second time when the people indicate at every opportunity that they have already made up their minds?”
 
 
 

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NEWS FROM SAOIRSE (freedom). The Voice of the Irish Republican Movement. Republican Sinn Féin http://rsf.ie 223 Parnell Street, Dublin 1 229 Falls Road, Belfast

Web layout by SAOIRSE -- Irish Freedom February 11, 2002  Send links, events notifications, articles, comments etc, to the editor at: saoirse@iol.ie.