Three Cheers for the Irish

Irish voters have overwhelmingly rejected the Lisbon Treaty..., hoorah, hooray!

Tallies of votes produced nationally by election observers, as well as early official returns, all showed the "no" camp ahead in the vast majority of Ireland's 43 electoral constituencies. Pro-treaty voters were clearly ahead in only a few.

Electoral officials expected to confirm the result later and send shock waves throughout the EU.

The euro fell to a one-month low on the news.

....

"Obviously it's disappointing. It's quite clear there's a very substantial 'no' vote," said [Justice Minister] Mr Ahern, who noted that 58% of voters rejected the treaty in his home district.

Read it here.

When voters actually have some say in the repeated attempts to impose a unified bureaucratic government on Europe, they tend to reject it, which of course infuriates the anti-nationalist technocrats who dreamed the whole scheme up.

UPDATE:

It's not the Irish alone -- none of the other EU countries allowed their citizens to vote on the treaty, instead requiring only governmental approval, but there seems to be a mass repudiation of the whole concept of a unified Euro-government building in the populace.

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) -- Political leaders across Europe were shaking their heads in frustration this weekend at the Irish voters' veto of the latest European Union treaty. But many of their citizens weren't.

Ordinary Spaniards, Dutch, French and Britons, who wish they could get the same chance, might also say "no" to the cold, distant heart of Europe.

"Spaniards feel Spanish, the French feel French, and the Dutch feel Dutch. We will never all be in the same boat," said Eduardo Herranz, a 41-year-old salesman in Madrid, Spain.

Herranz said Europeans were right to feel alienated from bureaucrats in the EU base of Brussels, Belgium.

"You don't decide on anything, and you don't get to vote on anything they are talking about," he said of the average voter. "In day-to-day life, out on the street, the European Union is something very distant."

Read the whole thing here.

Of course, that won't stop the Eurocrats -- they'll just go back to the drawing boards and come up with an even more undemocratic scheme to impose their continent-wide rule.