The UK’s referendum on EU membership matters. It matters a lot, more even than a clutch of elections. Indeed, the potential historic significance of the June 23rd poll is greater than any of the elections in which I was involved.
This referendum is not about British prime minister David Cameron's future, it is about the United Kingdom's. It also matters to Ireland – to every single one of you.
So, who is going to win? Remain or leave? In or out? The honest answer is I do not know. If I had to put my life on it, right here, right now, I would say In. But just as the Scottish independence vote was an emotional rollercoaster, this will be also.
In any campaign with a binary question essentially you have three groups of people.
There are people such as myself who would have voted to remain if Cameron had come back from his negotiations with a plastic bag. Then there are people like the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, who could not be satisfied no matter what Cameron secured.
Then you have the people who are going to decide this – the undecided.
During the Scottish referendum it was fantastic to walk down Scottish streets listening to children who were arguing not about Instagram or Justin Bieber but welfare reform and Trident. This time the debate has neither that richness nor the informed opinion. Time and time again people say that they feel confused, they do not really understand the issue, or that they do not know who to believe.
Part of the problem is the UK's wretched media. In the past its newspapers have reported that "Brussels" wanted to ban kilts, curries, Caerphilly cheese, mushy peas, paper rounds, charity shops, bulldogs and the British army.
Brainwashing
This propaganda has come from people who now dare to claim the EU is brainwashing children with pro-European propaganda, and go potty when the government sends out a leaflet setting out some facts.
Serious organisations have set out serious arguments against Brexit: the OECD, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of England, Deutsche Bank, Shell, BMW, Rolls Royce and many more. All have been dismissed by the propaganda sheets as poodles of "Project Fear". Had any one of them come out for Leave then how many front pages would have been cleared to tell us? Tons of them.
There is something comical about the way the anti-EU camp and its media cheerleaders rage constantly against those who dare to suggest a single reason to want to stay inside a union that has helped deliver peace and prosperity.
Indeed, given the scale of the bias over the years, it is a miracle there is a single reader of the Daily Mail or the Sun, the Star or the Daily Express left who is anything other than a fully fledged Outer.
Here, however, lies a huge opportunity for the In side. Although people hear the noise of our newspapers, they know they cannot be trusted as once perhaps they were.
Informed debate
If that is the good news, the bad news is that politicians in the
United Kingdom
are not trusted as they used to be either. It is not a happy scene for a healthy, informed debate.
The danger for the Remain campaign is that Leave true believers and their alliance of newspaper supporters manage to sew so much confusion and cynicism that they depress the vote as people say “I can’t decide” or “I can’t be bothered”.
No matter how loudly the Leave campaign shout "Project Fear" we must not stop warning of the dangers of exit. They bleat in the hope that we do stop warning. But there is a lot to be scared about if we sleepwalk out of Europe.
If we do not believe politicians, media or all the established economic authorities in the world, then who the hell do we believe? For the answer we need to understand the genius of Facebook – it is the simple concept of the friend.
We believe each other, we believe our friends.And this is where Ireland comes in.
All of you, I am sure, have friends in the UK. There are 660,000 Republic-born living in Britain who will be entitled to vote, plus 1.5 million with varying degrees of Irishness in their identity.
Ibec has rightly set out the case for Britain, Europe and Ireland of the UK staying In.
Ireland is not impotent in this debate. I say that you can have a say, and that you must. Each of you have friends and connections. I would urge you to contact all of them and tell them why it matters and why – if this is your view – you want them to stay.
Set a target. One a day. Minimum. Each of you. Get one Irish voter there to shift from unsure to In and you’ll be helping our country to avoid a catastrophic mistake, but also to avoid the inevitable damaging consequences for Ireland.
Alastair Campbell is today speaking on Brexit at a conference hosted by Ibec