However, Ryanair's Chief Executive Michael O'Leary has admitted that his motives for backing the "Yes" vote include a desire to buy the partly state-owned airlineAer Lingus. In a television interview, Mr O'Leary revealed:
"One of the reasons that I am campaigning for a 'yes' vote is that our Government is incompetent, yet I need to persuade them to sell me Aer Lingus."
The paper reports that the admission was seized upon as evidence of a "grubby deal", and quotes Libertas Chairman Declan Ganley saying, "We know our Government will say anything to get a 'yes'. Now it appears they will sell anything to get a 'yes' as well."
He called on Irish PM Brian Cowen to clarify "any agreement made with Michael O'Leary and Ryanair in order to secure their support for the Lisbon revote". Meanwhile, the Irish Independent reports that, in an opinion on the legal status of the Lisbon Treaty 'guarantees', senior counsel and TCD law lecturer Diarmuid Phelan has queried the guarantees, saying they are a clever EU strategy that "give the appearance" of respecting Irish sovereignty.
In his opinion, Mr Phelan highlighted a number of areas of concern, including the "veiled threat to Ireland" if the Treaty was not ratified, saying: "The campaign is set up, not as a choice between deeper integration and the status quo, which in law it is, but as a choice between in or out of Europe."
He added, "Fundamentally, the State is refusing to be bound by the constitutional result, and the EU is refusing to be bound by the State's right not to ratify...On this basis, in any ordinary legal environment, one must advise against, or at the very least caution, in changing one's position on the basis of the proffered guarantees."
In the FT Larry Siedentop, a fellow of Keble College, Oxford, argues that "What matters most for the future of the EU is that it create popular support for integration. It is failing to do so...in the EU a bureaucratic preference for reaching compromises behind the scenes and presenting them to the public as faits accomplis has been the norm. The EU may be a civil servant's dream but it is a citizen's nightmare."
Writing in the Irish Times under the headline, "We owe it to people of Europe to vote No" Irish broadcaster Vincent Browne argues, "The European Union lacks democratic legitimacy, and instead of dealing with that issue head on, the EU conspires to avoid popular endorsement or rejection. Voting No is a way of stopping these anti-democratic capers, and in voting No we would be acting as surrogates for the people of Europe as a whole."
Mike J Kirby