EU Relieved They Don't Have To Make The Irish Vote Again EU officials were relieved that the Irish did what they wanted with a 63% 'yes' vote on EU expansion over the weekend. This is the same thing they voted 'no' to 18 months ago. The Irish understand something that the larger EU countries do not. You see, the Irish have always been treated the way these new countries will be treated. They recognize that adding tens of thousands of pages of regulations to fragile post-Soviet economies is a bad thing ... they understand that none of those new countries is going to gain anything near what the established large countries have already gained. It's the European politics of fiefdom all over again. Worse, the EU has tried to make some countries choose between NATO and the EU. If you were a small country and you saw how the EU responds to threats, who would you choose? The Irish vote is a blow to independence for them ... but the EU had made no secret of two things; they would keep voting until they got the answer they wanted or the EU would simply come up with a plan that did not require an Irish vote. Article Here