If you were wondering what happened to the Irish Left you should have been in Buswell's Hotel in Dublin yesterday. Veteran campaigners such as Tomas Mac Giolla and Sean Garland of the Workers' Party were lined up with eager young activists such as Richard Boyd Barrett of the Socialist Alliance and the mid-generational but tireless Joe Higgins TD.
When I say Left, I mean Outside Left, not the Inside Left that is part of the consensus on industrial and political matters and which supports a Yes vote on the Nice Treaty. Here we had the unreconstructed anti-establishment, smash-capitalism-andbuild-a-workers'-republic Left that went seriously out of fashion among the chattering classes many years ago but still ploughs its lonely furrow regardless.
Mr Mac Giolla dismissed a pro-treaty piece in The Irish Times as "the most childlike article I have ever seen in my life"; criticised politicians from applicant countries such as the Czech Republic for telling Irish voters what to do; and found fault with information broadcasts from the Referendum Commission for portraying the Yes people as intellectually superior to the No camp, in a kind of pupil-teacher relationship.
Dishonesty was the charge levelled at the Yes side by Mr Boyd Barrett, whose Socialist Workers' Party has formed the Socialist Alliance with some of the other Left groups and individuals. If the treaty was about enlargement, then where were the dates for the candidate countries to join? The real agenda was a military and corporate one, aimed at establishing the EU as a superpower and pursuing the multinational drive for privatisation and deregulation to the continent's farthest corners.
Mr Higgins presented a scenario whereby EU political leaders were puppets of the "military-industrial complex", a phrase originally popularised by the very un-left-wing US president Dwight D. Eisenhower. In the normal run of things, even the Workers' Party - rightly or wrongly - receives only perfunctory attention in the Irish political debate. But these parties and "mosquito groups" are on the side of the argument that is expected to get the support of about one-third of and possibly more voters next Thursday.
It is another reflection of the lack of popular interest and involvement in the European project. The eminent commentator Timothy Garton Ash recently lamented the absence of a proper debate at grassroots level on the future of the EU. Writing in the New York Review of Books, he described the European debate as "a discussion among a small group drawn from national elites". What he calls the "initiates of the European inner temple" meet at conferences, read one another's books and correspond by letter or e-mail, but he complains that they constitute only a "tiny proportion" of the intellectual and political community and that there is a gap between them and what Pope John Paul II calls life "underneath, where the people are".
Ruairi Quinn, leader of the pro-EU Labour Party, has called for a forum to be set up to debate the future of Europe. The Government has indicated approval of the idea. But unless it is a real, grassroots "people's forum" that gets Donnybrook talking to Darndale and Kinsale debating with Kiltimagh, what would be the point of it?