Word: irelands
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When the results came in, Mary Claire Connellan felt ill. The news that Ireland had voted no in a referendum on the European Union's Lisbon treaty on June 12 left her "shaky and sick." Exhaustion didn't help: in the run-up to the vote, the 25-year-old stagiaire - an E.U. intern - had flown back to her native Ireland to canvass for a yes. For Connellan, the promise of a Europe freed from the ways of the past has long been an ideal. "I've seen the damage nationalism can do," she says. "Coming from Ireland...
...didn't work. All the cheery T shirts in the world and the backing of Ireland's major political parties couldn't win the day. Irish voters were told that Lisbon would mean their sons would be conscripted into a European army, that abortion would be legalized and that there were plans to implant microchips in Irish children. Connellan met voters convinced that Brussels would impose a one-child policy. And more potent even than the scare stories, says Connellan, was the confusion. Irish voters - many of whom cheerfully professed to being staunchly pro-European - simply didn't know what...
...became the E.U.'s first Commissioner of Institutional Relations and Communications. "Either it's painted as being very powerful, and therefore dangerous, or it's depicted as being busy with the size of strawberries, so it's ridiculed." Many in Brussels admit the pro-treaty campaign in Ireland had been complacent, assuming that Ireland's economic miracle after it joined the E.U. would be enough to convince its people that Lisbon was a good thing. "We have not been professional in the way we communicate," admits Wallstrom...
...Canute-like. In June, China banned shops throughout the country from giving out free plastic bags and banned the production, sale and use of any plastic bags less than one-thousandth of an inch thick. Bhutan banned the bags on the grounds that they interfered with national happiness. Ireland has imposed a hefty 34-cent fee for each bag used. Both Uganda and Zanzibar have banned them, as have 30 villages in Alaska. Scores of countries have imposed or are considering similar measures...
...than 10 million documents, some dating back as far as half a century ago. Key Universal subcontracted the job to workers in Grenada, who labored for twelve months to transfer the information to magnetic tapes. Foreign concerns are becoming more aggressive in seeking clients for their sophisticated wares. In Ireland, the government's development agency has targeted international services as a high-priority area for attracting foreign firms to the country. Compucorp, a California-based information-services company, is able to hire Irish programmers and computer engineers for about one-third the $50,000 annual salary that they would command...