The lampposts in Dublin’s financial district are adorned with three different posters from three different organisations all proclaiming the same warning: Ireland will lose its right to set its own tax rate if voters today sign up to the Lisbon treaty.

Taxes have remained at the centre of the country’s seven-week referendum campaign to ratify the European Union’s reform treaty, with No campaigners claiming that Ireland’s low corporation tax regime is under threat. A threat that has gained currency in spite of denials from the European Commission, experts at the Irish Institute of Taxation and every large political party and business group.