The Celtic Tiger Roars

Irish voters have apparently thrust a stake into the heart of the emerging European Union megastate.

Voters in Ireland have rejected the European Union's Lisbon reform treaty in a referendum by 53.4% to 46.6%.

The vote is a major blow to leaders in the 27-nation EU, which requires all its members to ratify the treaty. Only Ireland has held a public vote.

The European Commission has already said other nations should continue to ratify the treaty, which is designed to streamline decision-making.

Leaders of the No campaign said the vote was a "great result for Ireland".

An earlier, more wide-ranging EU draft constitution failed after French and Dutch voters rejected it in 2005.

Of course, rejection by the voters is something that doesn't mean a thing to the bureaucrats in Brussels, to whom the people of Europe are nothing more than an irritating inconvenience, whose will can be circumvented or ignored as needed on the way to that glorious socialist utopia that will be the EU.

But reacting to the result, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso still called on other members states to ratify the treaty.

"I believe the treaty is alive and we should now try to find a solution," he insisted in Brussels.

"The Irish government and the governments of the other member states will now need to assess what this result means for the process. The treaty was signed by all 27 member states, so there is a joint responsibility to address the situation."

Indeed, when Irish voters rejected an earlier EU treaty, the Irish government promptly held a "controversial" second vote, which yielded the desired "yes" vote.

Democracy is a word the Brussels bureaucracy likes to use, but not practice.