Ireland set for Lisbon 'dog house'

IRELAND will be in Europe's "dog house" if we reject the Lisbon Treaty in a second referendum, according to the chairman of the secretive global businesss organisation, the Bilderberg Group.


Viscount Etienne Davignon issued the stark caution in a rare interview ahead of addressing an international conference on Lisbon in University College Cork (UCC) on Wednesday.


"Ireland will be in the dog house if it says no for a second time", Davignon told the Sunday Tribune." The other states who ratified the Treaty have now become hostages of the Irish position and the Irish should have had some respect for the opinions of the other states. 


"Ireland has not done badly out of Europe and so you get the impression that Irish people have the attitude that as long as they were getting something out of it they were in favour of it. But now that this is no longer the case you just want to say 'Thank you. Now you guys can go home'.


"It would be much more different if Ireland had suffered from the union. We could say we have not treated you properly but that is not the case so there is a feeling that Ireland is not respecting the rules of working in common. The Irish have to pay some attention to what the others say.


"Trust us. You have trusted in the past and not done so badly so why not trust in the future? We are not going to do you any harm. Trust us."


Foreign affairs minister Micheal Martin will be among the speakers at the UCC conference that has been organised by the university and the Alliance Francaise. Titled 'Europe: International Power', it will have a theme of reflecting on the future of Europe following the recent Irish referendum decision. 


Davignon (76), who has had a decorated political career in his native Belgium and in the EU, is the chairman of the Bilderberg group, which is an annual invitation-only conference for more than 100 of the world's financial and political elite.


Set up in the 1950s, the group is said to steer international policy from behind closed doors and although participants rarely reveal their attendance, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and David Rockefeller are among those who are said to have previously attended.


Davignon was critical of Taoiseach Brian Cowen's admission that he did not read the Lisbon treaty. "Cowen should not have made that public," he said. "He was saying to the Irish people, 'I have not read this treaty but I am asking you to vote yes to it.' This was just handing a strong simple argument to his opponents."

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