If it comes into force, the Lisbon treaty is going to damage the Irish economy — and hit you in the pocket. The damage to Ireland would be threefold. Firstly, Irish businesses would have to put up with more unnecessary EU regulations, because the country’s ability to say “no” to new EU laws would be dramatically curtailed. Secondly, EU judges would gain huge new powers to interfere in the running of the economy through the Charter of Fundamental Rights, potentially damaging Ireland’s competitive edge against its rivals. Thirdly, the Irish government would lose its right to do the kind of investment deals which have helped lure so many multinationals to this country.

As somebody who thinks that Ireland should be a model for the rest of Europe (and helped to write a book to that effect) I think it would be a tragedy to allow this tiger economy to be shackled by rivals who want to blunt its competitive edge.

The non-nerdy majority of us don’t spend our lives thinking and worrying about EU regulations. They’re normally hugely complicated and almost unintelligible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a huge impact.

Unnecessary EU regulations aren’t just annoying, they are seriously bad for the economy and jobs. The taoiseach’s office recently estimated that “unnecessary” EU regulations cost the Irish economy nearly ¤600m a year. That’s enough to cut income tax by 4% or build two new hospitals every year.

The same study says that, in total, EU regulations cost 3% of Irish GDP a year. Given that the EU commission estimates that the single market only creates benefits of slightly more than 2% of GDP a year, you can see why more and more people in business want the EU to do less but do it better.

If you add up all of the EU rules and regulations currently in force, it comes to a staggering 170,000 pages. If you were to lay the pages end to end you’d have more than 50km of red tape. And in recent years the red tape has been spewing out faster and faster; in fact, more than 100,000 of those pages were churned out in the last 10 years alone.

It is no surprise then, that one of the most vocal advocates of a “no” vote in Ireland has been the business-backed campaign group Libertas, which counts names such as aviation entrepreneur Ulick McEvaddy among its supporters.

If the Lisbon treaty were ratified, it would take the EU in exactly the wrong direction. It would mean even more red tape. Not only would Lisbon abolish more than 60 national vetoes, it would also drastically reduce Ireland’s say at the EU’s top table, and Ireland’s voting power to block damaging new regulations would be cut by 40%.

One immediate problem on the horizon is the negotiations on the EU Temporary Agency Workers Directive.

Ireland and a minority of other liberal governments have resisted the directive until now. But the balance of votes within the EU Council is on a knife edge. Ireland and its friends are unlikely to be able to stop it if the Lisbon treaty comes into force.

Billy Kelleher, the minister of state for employment, has said the proposal could “undermine competitiveness” and that it “could damage future job creation prospects and deter the use of temporary agency workers”. Now is surely a crazy time to do anything that might damage the economy.

Another area for concern is financial services. During the last round of negotiations on the Financial Services Action Plan, Ireland managed to block some of the more damaging proposals, saving the country hundreds of millions of euros. Under the new voting system, though, this might not be possible. For a country that has the third biggest financial services sector per head in Europe, that would be a big problem.

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