Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

Yes and the Labour Party did not get its fair share of the coverage.

The Labour Party, however, played an honourable role from the beginning. Its campaign started as early as 18 November 2007 when an overwhelming vote was given to support the "Yes" campaign at our national conference in Wexford.

As early as 12 December, the day before the Heads of State signed the treaty in Lisbon, the Labour Party had its first press conference to launch the seminal Charter of Fundamental Rights. For the next three months, the party screamed at the Government to get its act together, to publish and distribute information that people were crying out for and to put the ratification process in place.

A paralysed Government was also deaf. What should have been won was lost. The ball is firmly back in the Government's court. Our shell-shocked colleagues in Brussels and the other 26 member states are not jumping to conclusions, thankfully, but are waiting for the Taoiseach to explain the results and make proposals for the future of the treaty.

Past experience suggests two options — either a rerun of the same treaty as in the second Nice referendum or a period of reflection, as when France and the Netherlands rejected the EU constitutional treaty, with another fresh treaty presented for ratification by all 27 member states. Since nobody knows definitively why the Lisbon treaty was rejected, the remedy might prove worse than the ailment.

The third option is to leave well enough alone, accept the will of the people explicitly and perform the last rites as David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary adverted to. In this scenario there still remains a substantial residue of administrative and operational matters from the treaty that contains no constitutional impediment.

In this respect also, the original advice of the Attorney General on the constitutional implications of the Lisbon treaty would be valuable and I believe the Taoiseach should make it available. The Attorney General should also be asked to advise in detail on the specific innovations in the treaty to determine which and to what degree they may impact on the Constitution. This would be helpful towards planning the way forward. We cannot rerun Lisbon but we can reflect on it and move on.

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