The results in full

It was meant to be such a noble cause. Grateful Europeans would one day immortalise the drafters of an EU constitution with “statues of you on horseback in the villages you all come from”. But the citizens of Ireland have given a less glorious verdict.

By a quirk of fate, it was Ireland, and in particular its former leader Bertie Ahern, that secured agreement on the constitution while chairing the Brussels summit of June 2004.

This was a spectacular achievement, three years after Ireland had rejected the Nice treaty, and just six months after a meeting to finalise the constitution’s text had collapsed in acrimony.

The path to the Lisbon treaty began on May 9, 2000, when Joschka Fischer, then Germany’s Foreign Minister, called for a European constitution. The idea was endorsed by EU leaders in December 2001 at a summit in Laeken, on the edge of Brussels, when they set up a convention to draw up “a constitution for European citizens”. This was to overhaul the complex decision-making machinery and bring the EU closer to its citizens by producing a clear, readable text on what it could and could not do.

The chairman of the convention, the 75-year-old French ex-president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, told members that one day their citizens would erect monuments to them.

By July 2003, it had completed its work and with glasses of champagne in their hands and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, Europe’s unofficial anthem, ringing in their ears, the convention’s members toasted their success.

And so the text was handed over to EU governments, which continued their own negotiations as Britain and others fought for their “red lines”, until June 2004. The Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe was signed in Rome four months later.

Spain became the first country to ratify it by referendum, with a hefty 77 per cent “yes” vote, in February 2005. But smiles were soon wiped off faces when the French rejected it, in May, and the Dutch gave it a 61 per cent “no” three days later.

The text was put on hold while governments agonised over ways to introduce the changes that many argued were necessary. In June last year, An-gela Merkel grasped the nettle by launching a short, sharp inter-governmental conference to prepare a new text. This they did by October.

In order to avoid referendums, the new document was an old-style “amending treaty” rather than a replacement for previous agreements. The relatively clear language of the 448-article draft constitution disappeared in a legal jungle of cross-references, amendments, deletions and protocols that even lawyers had difficulty in understanding.

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