UNDER a drizzly sky, the Eurocrats of Brussels smiled and handed out balloons at their annual open day yesterday. Behind closed doors, however, as one official admitted: “They’re all s******* themselves.”

In four days Ireland will vote on the European reform treaty and polling suggests that the “no” camp will win. If it does, the European Union mandarins will once again have been thwarted in their efforts to impose a “stealth constitution” on the union’s 500m population.

French and Dutch voters killed off the original constitution three years ago; now the Irish may be poised to dispatch its replacement, the Lisbon treaty, on Thursday. Yet the Eurocrats apparently have no plan C. Constitutional chaos looms.

Behind his own closed doors this weekend, David Cameron may also be less than thrilled. The last thing he wants – after the resignation last week of a leading Tory MEP for the misuse of nearly £450,000 of allowances – is for Europe to return to the top of the political agenda.

Whatever his personal misgivings about the Lisbon treaty, it at least closes down the issue that tore his party apart for more than a decade and has enabled him to claw back a potentially election-winning dominance in the polls.

Its reopening would be the red light for his die-hard antiEuropean faction to split the party and remind British voters why they gave up voting Conservative.

Even Gordon Brown, desperate for anything that would give him a leg-up in the polls, has no reason to welcome an Irish “no” vote. He is not interested in the tedium of European diplomacy.

So why are Irish voters apparently preparing to deliver this death blow to Europe’s ever-closer cohesion and why has it come as such a shock?

At the outset of the referendum campaign, the “yes” camp seemed unstoppable, combining the forces of the governing Fianna Fail party with its opponents in Fine Gael and Labour, as well as business lobby groups and the trade unions. A poll in mid-May showed 35% support for a yes vote, 18% for no and 47% for “don’t know”.

Pumping out bland reassurances, the Dublin Establishment was still quietly confident early last week that it would prevail. Irish bookies were offering odds as slim as 1-5 on a “yes” vote.

The first hint of potential disaster came on Wednesday as office workers ate lunch in the atrium of the Citi building in Dublin’s financial services district.

Suddenly, half the cabinet was upon them. Seven senior ministers and two juniors leapt off Fianna Fail’s “yes bus” in search of a photo opportunity.

The plan had been a good one when conceived a day or two earlier: turn up in the sunshine on a cafe-crammed boulevard, share a coffee with young execs, smile for the cameras, then back on the bus.

However, Tuesday’s blue skies had turned to a steady downpour on Wednesday, so the Citi building was selected as a fall-back indoor venue. The bus arrived half an hour late, long after the lunchtime rush.

The ministers split up to corner the few prey remaining. One thirty-something executive was coy about his intentions, but Mary Hanafin, minister for social and family affairs, coaxed a confession out of him. He was thinking of voting “no”.

There was nothing in the Lisbon treaty that he objected to; he just did not like the fact that nobody else in Europe was getting an opportunity to vote. No other country, including Britain, is holding a referendum.

This was a hint of the blow to come. Sampling was under way for the most dramatic poll of the campaign. Published on Friday, The Irish Times/TNS mrbi survey showed a rise of 17 percentage points in favour of the “no” vote and a five-point drop from the “yes” ranks. The “no” camp had moved into a five-point lead, with 35% of voters undecided. Asked for reasons, 30% of “no” voters said they did not know what they were voting for. They did not understand the treaty.

Psephologists have been parsing the numbers to work out what this would mean on Thursday. “Yes” campaigners say there is a hard core of 200,000 “no” voters in Ireland’s 3m electorate. To win, the “yes” camp needs a turnout of more than 40%.

When Ireland voted “no” in the first referendum on the Nice treaty in 2001, turnout was 34%. The second referendum on Nice a year later was passed comfortably with a 49% turnout.

Seven out of 10 people polled last week said they were “very likely” to vote on Thursday and a further 12% were “fairly likely”. This suggests a turnout of more than 80%.

In other words, it is all to play for. But the headline numbers have given a boost to the “no” campaign, which has drawn on a new layer of liberal middle-class opposition to the European project, as well as Ireland’s traditional antiEU lobby: the hard left, the Catholic right and Sinn Fein. This broad church has made unlikely bedfellows.

The main vehicle for the antiLisbon treaty campaign is Liber-tas, the think tank co-founded by Declan Ganley, a London-born Irish millionaire. He supported the Nice treaty but has described the Lisbon treaty as a “cut and paste” recreation of the constitution that the French and Dutch had rejected. He sees Ireland as the last battleground for European democracy.

In Castlebar, Co Mayo, last week John Carty, a 43-year-old trade unionist, told Ganley: “I have nothing in common with you. I don’t believe in anything you believe in but, on this one, I am with you and I wish you all the best in what you are doing.”

In Galway on Friday, Brian Cowen, the taoiseach, was still confident. “I’m not contemplating defeat; I’m expecting victory,” he said, shrugging off the protests of fishermen angry at the rising cost of diesel and the static price of fish.

Cowen, 48, who took over the premiership last month from Bertie Ahern, is one of Ireland’s most accomplished politicians. A defeat in the first poll of his leadership would be disastrous for him. There is much at stake for other yes campaigners, too, and the blame game could be bitter if Lisbon sinks.

The Irish government is avoiding any discussion of the consequences of defeat. Key “no” campaigners have held out the prospect of renegotiating “a better deal” for Ireland. But Brian Leni-han, minister for finance, said renegotiation would reopen for Ireland and other nations vast areas which they had thought were closed and protected.

He said Ireland had protected its neutrality, its low corporate tax rate and its veto on world trade talks in the Lisbon treaty, but he could not guarantee they would stay protected under any renegotiated text.

In Brussels there is an undercurrent of fear that rejection by Ireland would mean the death of the treaty, as the Irish could not be asked to vote again after a few tweaks to the text.

EU officials refuse to budge from their mantra that there is no alternative to the Lisbon treaty. But one senior official confided: “The honest truth is they are all s******* themselves.”

Informed sources said there was “lots of counselling going on that everybody should stay quiet” until the Irish prime minister reacts to a no result and says what he plans to do.

Then a summit of EU leaders would try to sort out a solution to key issues such as the roles of the proposed president of the union, foreign minister and EU diplomatic service.

Despite protestations to the contrary, sources say the Czech government – which takes over the EU presidency in January 2009, when the treaty should come into force - has been preparing a contingency plan for a no vote. This would include technical changes allowing governments to have a more influen-tial role in European affairs than the EU president.

For Gordon Brown, any renegotiation would be unwelcome. “Brown hates going to Brussels,” said one aide who has worked closely with the prime minister.

“He hates the way you have to be nice to prime ministers of obscure countries and remember their names. He is frustrated that he cannot just bang his fist and get his way.”

The Lisbon treaty - which is supposed to be ratified by all 27 member states by December 31 and is expected to complete its parliamentary ratification in Britain in the next few weeks – was negotiated by Tony Blair in the dying days of his leadership. Any renegotiation or new treaty would be more closely linked to Brown, making him the focus of British Eurosceptic protests.

“Brown is trying to focus public attention on his attempt to deal with rising global fuel and food prices,” said one Labour strategist. “The last thing he wants is public debate being dominated by talk of ‘red lines’ and selling out to Europe.”

Furthermore, while Brown managed to shrug off demands for a British referendum on the treaty last year, he may find it harder to resist the pressure a second time. Then he was still in his political honeymoon and riding high in the polls. Now he is the most unpopular Labour leader since polls began.

If the Irish vote no and negotiations begin on a new treaty, Cameron will be able to make political capital by demanding that a weakened Brown grants a referendum, but the Conservative leader will be fearful of being embarrassed by his party’s “swivel-eyed tendency”, for whom Europe remains an article of almost religious faith.

Splits over Europe have undermined every Conservative leader since Edward Heath in the 1970s. Cameron has made a conscious decision to “park” the issue, discussing the EU as little as possible, but beneath the surface deep divisions remain.

In a sign of the strength of the hard-line Eurosceptic wing, 47 Conservative MPs, almost a quarter of the total, last year signed a Commons early-day motion saying that an incoming Tory government should still call a referendum even if the treaty had already been ratified.

This week a review of whether the UK government should hold a referendum, won by Stuart Wheeler, the Tory millionaire, will open in the High Court. It is understood that antiBrussels Conservative MPs will also renew their pressure on their leadership this summer with a guerrilla campaign.

Additional reporting: Nicola Smith, Brussels; Jonathan Oliver, London

The tycoon taking on the Lisbon ‘eejits’

IT’S 1.30am on Thursday and Declan Ganley, leader of the Irish campaign against the EU treaty, is sitting in an armchair next to his snooker table, smoking a Montecristo No 2. After another long day on the campaign trail, the 39-year-old is still abuzz with all things Lisbon.

Why would a UK-born businessman with interests in America give so much time to a campaign that mainly concerns Irish politicians?

“I started reading the Lisbon treaty as a businessman looking for opportunities,” he says. “I finished reading it as a father of four worried about my children’s future.”

Ganley appears to enjoy cocking a snook at the Fianna Fail government and Brian Cowen, Ireland’s new prime minister.

“After one public meeting, a Fianna Fail person came up to me, told me the party was watching me, taking down what I said and sending it back to headquarters. I said, ‘Good, in that case, tell Brian Cowen he should read the f****** treaty’.”

But he has been forced to field questions about the source of his wealth, his motives and his financial backing. He also faces suspicions that he is not truly Irish.

He was born in London, the eldest son of west of Ireland emigrants who returned to Galway when he was 13. He didn’t go to college but - after a stint on building sites in London and a job as a tea boy at an insurance company – he made money, he says, buying and selling aluminium, privatising sawmills in Russia and exporting timber before moving into telecommunications.

Having made his money, he moved back in style to Moyne Park House, an early 19th century mansion in Tuam, Co Galway, with his American-born wife Delia and their four children.

A devout Catholic, he has what one old acquaintance calls “a touch of more-Irish-than-the-Irish about him”. But Rivada, his latest communications venture, is based in America and supplies emergency response systems to the US military’s Northern Command and other clients. He says sales for this year could be as high as $140m.

Ganley likes to name-drop and doesn’t deny American links. But he rejects the wild conspiracy theories for his No campaign. “Apparently,

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