I awe’i upon a’wu tim by was in, Rows Eke, no jay kay’i annul so it faq geoff-louse. Cull’ no, Boyd Ely, fin wag’i mists ku jo ire vance-spilt.

In voting for a candidate or a party, what we say is that we like them better than the other guys that might win. Or, if we think the outcome’s predetermined for whatever reason, to say that they’re better than all the other guys. That is, it’s not necessarily indicative of thinking the person you’re supporting knows better than you about everything.

And accepting representative democracy is either not a real choice (because there is almost certainly no way to achieve it without the support of the political class and/or the military, neither of which groups is generally into direct democracy), or a decision that we have better things to with our lives than spend a few years getting a law degree and then voting on some damn bill on highway appropriations or whatever every wekeend between buying groceries and getting the kids to football practice and fizing the toilet. So: letting the PPE majors who actually like this crap (myself included) do most of the day-to-day work also doesn’t mean trusting their judgment above one’s own.

So I don’t see a sense in which voting for someone implies thinking them better at task of lawmaking, not only in general but in the specific case of a particular law. To be sure, their thoughts on the subject are worth listening to—but the Yes side couldn’t be bothered to say much more than “the sky will fall unless you vote Yes.” Which it hasn’t.

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it is a gross oversimplification to say that responsibility runs only one way between government and individual. For example we have some commitment to obey the law even if it is imposed by a party we didn’t vote for.

Of course, the nature of representative government is we accept that public laws we individually disagree with can nonetheless be binding upon us.

But that’s not the issue here. The treaty was a proposed law, and the Irish voters decided they did not particularly wish to be bound by this (proposed) law.

Minor point – if by ‘give due consideration’ you mean ‘be aware of/consider the implications of’, then fine. If you mean ‘give positive weight’, then no.

Major point – the only commitments that officials could legitimately give in this case were to hold a referendum, and to campaign in favour of acceptance. Any commitment to amend the constitution would have been illegitimate.

Oh, fuck off.

Government =/= law.

But since party-voting is a rather broad thing, that said very little about Irish voter’s support for this Constitutional change unless the main rallying plank was the Constitutional change. And my impression from all the talk about the government just woke up to the idea that it had to campaign to rally around the treaty is that it was not in fact such a rallying plank.