The Remain campaign in the British referendum ignored valuable information from Ireland on how to win a vote, former Fine Gael strategist Frank Flannery has said.
Speaking on the Irish Times Inside Politics podcast with Green Party leader Eamon Ryan and political scientist Theresa Reidy, Mr Flannery told presenter Hugh Linehan that senior figures in the Remain campaign such as Peter Mandelson and Will Straw never used the material.
“I did have a certain involvement with them about six months ago,” Mr Flannery said. “We sent over some brilliant stuff on the Irish experience over five or six referendums, and we gave it to the Remain campaign, but it was buried. Because they know an awful lot better. They wouldn’t be coming to a crowd of Paddies asking them to do anything.”
Mr Ryan said the UK “could have learned some lessons from us in terms of having a referendum commission”, but he argued that referendums had a valuable part to play in the democratic process.
He cited the rejection of the last government’s proposals to abolish the Seanad and give more power to Oireachtas committees as examples of how referendums had benefited the country. “I still believe you should trust the people,” he said.
The number of referendums held across the world has been on the increase in the last 40 years, according to Dr Reidy, who described this s a political response to the increasing political detachment of voters.
“It’s useful to think of referendums as part of a whole suite of measures that we’ve started seeing come into use all over the world,” she said. “Things like participatory budgeting and citizen’s assemblies. Here in Ireland we had a form of that with the constitutional convention, and we’re going to have another citizen’s assembly.”
