The Irish government has dispatched a mission to Copenhagen to learn lessons from the Danes about how they fixed opt-outs and successfully re-ran a lost referendum. But the two countries' situations are not the same. Fear of being marginalised played a big part in Denmark's change of mind. That fear is less compelling once voters realise that they are not alone in their concerns. In the end, the Irish government will probably conclude that the Sarkozy plan, in its simple form, would be too risky to put to the test. Ingenious minds are therefore at work to find a way to induce the Irish judiciary to change its advice about the constitutional requirement for a referendum. For example, the treaty could be subdivided into those parts that the Dáil alone could ratify and those that need a national vote - an idea already floated by the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen. If the sensitive areas could be given some opt-outs, simultaneously with Croatia's accession as a member state, the thinking goes, there could be an Irish referendum on the opt-outs, while the rest of Lisbon's contents could be stuck in the Croatian accession treaty and ratified (solely by parliaments) in all 27 member states. This would be hard to defeat without seeming to be against enlargement. This could lead to a race against time as Croatia's accession runs up against the last possible date for the -British election, May 2010.

Such a devious and clumsy scheme would, of course, be outrageous. It should be unthinkable to incorporate what is, in effect, a constitution into the accession arrangements for a small Balkan state that has been in existence as a democracy for fewer than 20 years. But such is the desperation in integrationist circles that the idea of bundling the EU's enlargement and the Lisbon Treaty into a single package is distinctly appealing as a way of spreading confusion and discouraging opposition to the Treaty's constitutional clauses. For the option of actually listening to what voters are saying is not even on the edge of the radar scheme of these institutional zealots.

The desire to keep the essentials of self--determination was the common factor in the Dutch, French and Irish rejections. Euro-baro-meter, the EU's regular survey, reveals similar attitudes in the EU electorates that were denied a vote on the Lisbon Treaty (since the European project started, a dozen referendums have gone against the almost unanimous recommendations of the political élites).