Lack of knowledge gives legs to No side's untruths
'I'm amazed at how many people believe the lies' a Yes campaigner stunned at the No side's myth-making tells Sarah Caden
Regina O'Connor back from Brussels to campaign for a Yes vote.
A few weeks ago, Regina O'Connor's mother in Co Cork posted her a leaflet she had come across in her parish church.
"She's part of a rosary group and they get various leaflets with different prayers and rosaries on them, but there was one designed to look and seem like a prayer that was actually a No campaign publication," Ms O'Connor, the legal and political adviser to Pat Cox and the Yes to Lisbon campaign explains.
"And you open it up," she continues, and it contains "messages that prey on a vulnerability, and prey on people who will believe something because it seems the Church is saying it to them" along with spurious quotes.
When she talks about preying on the vulnerable with "lies, mistruths and misrepresentations", Ms O'Connor -- who is in Ireland to help with the Yes campaign, before she returns to her new job in Brussels advising the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) group in the European Parliament -- uses the image of a vacuum into which false information is being pumped. She laments the lack of information and education on the EU in times other than the run-up to a referendum -- Europe, it's not just for Christmas, you know -- and says that this lack allows the lies to thrive.
"If everyone knew how the EU works," she says, "they'd know that the posters about the €1.84 minimum wage and the notion of a conscription to an army that doesn't even exist are lies. If you know the facts, you know the posters don't make sense. But when a vacuum exists, it's easy to fill it with lies. And I'm amazed how many people are believing the lies."
It's the older and the younger Irish people who are being taken in, Ms O'Connor observes as she travels the country on the Yes campaign. Young people, perhaps, can't understand why anyone would be allowed to get away with a lie; while older people are understandably more easily scared.
She expresses relief that the Catholic bishops have come out in favour of a Yes vote and says that, around the country, it is becoming clear that women of all ages are becoming more and more aware of what Europe has done for them in terms of equal pay, maternity benefit and the ability to stay in work after marriage.
A referendum is a fantastic opportunity to explain the EU, but it's a fleeting and sometimes emotion- and adrenaline-fuelled period, and the momentum ends with the vote, regardless of which way it goes. It's not just about filling a vacuum during referendum time, says Ms O'Connor, it's about ongoing education, and her online publication The Reasons Why is the kind of thing she'd love to see on the school curriculum. Online less than a month, more than 400 downloads have been made so far, and its pithy style, puzzling over the celebrating Sinn Fein and UKIP, post-Lisbon I, as "a motley crew"; and describing the mistruths of the No side as "humbug", her turn of phrase is as catchy as any sloganeer on the other side. Which, perhaps, is what is called for at this stage of the game.
It's a world, after all, where Declan Ganley is given a platform to match that of a Government minister, or at least an elected representative. It's a world where Dublin City Council is accused of being in cahoots with the opponents of Coir, of which, thankfully, there are many more than at the start of this campaign. It's a world where there is no ongoing monitoring of what's being said and the degree to which what's being said is true, false, or somewhere in between. Which, it is often said, is where the truth resides. But you can only vote on one side or the other, and fear should not determine which.
"We're not constantly answering the negatives," says O'Connor, "but when people ask, the lies are very easy to debunk and then, once you've done that, it's over and gone. Such as, your Minister for Finance sets the minimum wage in this country, not the EU, that's the end of the red herring that is the minimum wage issue. And when I went to talk to young people in my old school, they were perplexed by how what's being said on these posters is a selection of lies, but after a short Q and A, they moved on."
Nature hates a vacuum, and who has managed to fill it most effectively is something we will know by next weekend.
