Dublin - Ireland had already moved into "post-mortem" phase by midday Friday as unofficial tallies, known for their accuracy, showed that the European Union's Lisbon Treaty was in for a thrashing in the referendum. Leader of the Libertas group, which spearheaded the no campaign, Declan Ganley said that it was "a great and proud day to be Irish."
The vote was a "blow for democracy," he said emphasizing that the Irish were not eurosceptic.
"It was a great day of hope and optimism," he said, and a "healthy day for democracy in Europe."
With the feeling that the Irish public had been bullied and threatened into voting yes for a treaty that few had read or understood, the mood was ebullient with little fear of the consequences for Ireland.
Speaking on Ireland's national broadcaster RTE, Opposition Fine Gael Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Mairead McGuinness, who had campaigned for a yes vote, said that "three things had defeated the referendum."
"The fact that the taoiseach (Prime Minister Brian Cowen) had not read it, the fact that Charlie Mc Creevy (EU competition commissioner) had not read it, and the fact that women had feared that their children would end up being called up into a European army," she said.
"A lot of Irish people were reading misinformation with regard to moral issues," she added.
Green MEP Patricia Mc Kenna vowed that Ireland's rejection of the treaty had to be taken seriously in Europe.
"We can't allow the leaders of Europe to dictate to us," she said.
Former Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte said that the "no campaigners had been allowed to plant a number of canards in the mind of the public, before the yes campaign got under way."
A strike for "the little man" is how independent Senator David Norris described the expected defeat Friday of the European Union's Lisbon Treaty in Ireland.
Norris has been campaigning for the no side on the basis of fears over Ireland's neutrality and he feels that the treaty was foisted on Ireland in an anti-democratic fashion.
"We have known for sometime that Brian Cowen had not fully read the treaty. We then discovered the commissioner had not fully read it and stated that anybody who did would be an idiot," he said.
Norris' fears are centred around the "European armaments group, coyly renamed the European Defence Agency."
The question of "whether Ireland will be committed to budgetary spending to get into the international arms trade," was not addressed and that the "specified intention of the European Defence Agency" was to go "into competition with the United States of America."
Although emphasizing, in common with many on the no side, that he is a good European, Norris feels that while the question of Ireland's involvement in the European Defence Agency remained unanswered, the Irish had no choice but to vote no.
