As Irish voters were making their way to the polls on June 12, UK newspapers reported that the European Union had banned dogs from boarding-house kitchens on health and safety grounds.

“Well, that’s it,” said one middleish-ranking Commission official perusing the “Barking Mad Brussels” headlines over coffee in Euroland. “If they weren’t already going to vote ‘no’, they will now…”

He was joking, and it wasn’t true anyway – you might say the story was the dog’s b*ll*cks. But something happen-ing in a Dublin polling station was funnier.

Because sometime in the morning of June 12, a woman in her sixties who has two sons, toddled off to do her democratic duty. She intended to vote “yes” to the Lisbon Treaty, but by the time she got to the voting booth, she had changed her mind and voted “no”.

Apparently, and this is from an impeccable source very close to the woman and to Ireland, she fell into discussion with campaigners just outside the polling station and was persuaded that if she voted “yes”, her two boys would be conscripted into a European army. She wasn’t going to take any chances, and who can blame her? 

Presumably other “no” voters weren’t prepared to risk agreeing to compulsory abortions and euthanasia either, and maybe, who knows, others decided not to run the risk that Snoodles the Labrador would be banished from his place in front of the Aga in the family B&B under the treaty provisions. And then there was the case of someone who believed that the treaty would allow Eurocrats to put their children into care if they felt the need.

Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge now, a non is a no is a nee, and, as Ireland’s Foreign Minister Micheál Martin helpfully pointed out at a post-poll press conference, even those campaigning for a “no” vote are “pro-Europe and pro-EU.”

So that’s all right then, and life goes on as normal because there never has been any clear evidence that those evil twins Gridlock and Deadlock would blight Europe if the new treaty fell at one or other of the 27 fences it had to clear.

There are still a few hurdles to go, but ordinary folk across Europe have adopted the Dunkirk spirit, which, along with Euroscepticism, is one of England’s greatest exports.

The only sense of real crisis, chaos, confusion and catastrophe surrounds not the EU but the EU’s public relations record. Because, as Lady Bracknell might have said, to lose one constitution may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a treaty as well looks like carelessness.

And who has been careless? Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen is going around looking like a bloodhound whose bone has been nicked, denying that he completely misread the Irish mood. He insists this is an EU problem and not an Irish problem.

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso addressed the planet after the “no” vote with an expression on his face just like Oliver Hardy when Stan has got him into another fine mess. He......