One of the first lessons taught in journalism school is the requirement to inveigle the reader into reading the story. Modern newspaper design is obsessed to the point of reductive­ness with "selling the story" by means of illustrations, sidebars, column breakers, sexy headlines and intros that grab you by the throat and won't let go until the last fullstop. 'What is the purpose of writing the damn thing if nobody will want to read it?' goes the prevailing wisdom of all-singing, all-dancing news purveying.

By that barometer, Irish journalism deserves zero points for its coverage of the Lisbon treaty referendum campaign. We managed to make Lisbon as readable as the small Taiwanese print on a lawnmower with an excessive number of fiddly bits. Collectively, we determined from the outset that Lisbon was a yawn, especially once the flag, the Beethoven hymn and the god allusion were dropped from it.

Even more abysmal was the performance of journalism's principal function as the disseminator of information. Having decided that if we were bored then everybody else must be too, great tantalising mysteries were left untouched by the objective hand of investigation. After six months dominating our European conversation, we know little more at the end of it about the Libertas founder and newcomer to the national stage, Declan Ganley, than we did at the start.

When Colm Keena of the Irish Times attempted to answer some of the starker questions in a profile of Ganley, the hackles it raised in the lead campaign of the No camp – culminating in a nasty little contretemps in Dublin last week – should have whetted the curiosity of other journalists. Clues lay all around the place like footprints. He'd had business dealings in eastern Europe, the US, the Middle East and Russia. A profile of him would have made a must-watch Prime Time Investigates, you would have thought. Any serious media outlet would have dedicated resources to the story, you would have thought. An examination of the personalities and motivations conspiring in the weird alliance of capitalists, armed republicans in recovery, anti-abortionists, farmers and pacifists would have made compelling reading. Or so you would have thought. And thought would have made a fool of you.

Mysteries

Mysteries flourished, too, on the Yes side. After the Referendum Commission pronounced that Irish neutrality and the veto on taxation were impervious to Lisbon, commentators latched onto both issues with the desperation of scavenging dogs sniffing a bone. It was as if they feared there would be nothing else to talk about if they let go. The upshot was that Brian Cowen's extraordinary concession to farmers on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks slipped right past the radar. Interviewers demanded of everyone from the Taoiseach and commissioner Charlie McCreevy to the man on the street, 'But have you read all 400-plus pages of the treaty?' as if reading it would switch on the light of revelation. The Lisbon treaty supplanted Ulysses as the litmus test of cerebral patriotism.

Bludgeoning the experts into humiliating confessions with the single transferable question was an easier option than tackling the confusion – not of the document itself, but of the media. Last weekend, virtually every columnist came out of the rejectionist closet despite their newspapers religiously toeing the establishment's yes line. Matt Cooper in the Sunday Business Post, Vincent Browne (ditto, and the next day in the Irish Times), Gene Kerrigan (Sunday Independent) and Diarmuid Doyle of this newspaper all argued against ratification. The coalition of right-wing fundamentalists and bleeding-heart liberals within the commentariat mirrored the bizarre coalitions forming all over the place. Fintan O'Toole, the Irish Times's totemic intellectual, fought bravely and almost alone for the shrinking pro-side.

On Thursday, polling day, the Irish Independent dared to re-enact its defining payback editorial of 1997 with a page-one instruction to its readers to vote yes. Inside the paper, however, the Indo's pillar of opinion, Bruce Arnold, urged his readers "to emphatically reject the cut in our power". Kevin Myers, the country's highest-paid columnist, had already warned against handing "our future over to Euro-lawyers".

If the political establishment majored in anti-intellectual scaremongering, the media proved no purer a paragon with its low-brow analysis of a highly technocratic debate. When the Daily Mail, in true Eurosceptic mode, reported at the end of April on a leaked memo by a British diplomat, there was a nanosecond when it seemed Lisbon might take off after all. "The Treaty Con" thundered the headline, recounting that the diplomat's note of a briefing by foreign affairs mandarins in Iveagh House conveyed the government's intention to sell the treaty to the people by ramming the message of our EU-given bounty down our throats, rather than discussing the merits of Lisbon.

Indictment

Even Liveline failed to ignite the debate by bringing Sinéad O'Connor into it. Probably the ultimate indictment was the Sunday Independent's invitation to Bertie Ahern to pen an ode to Lisbon four days before the plebiscite – four days, too, after he told the Mahon tribunal he won a few thousand sterling backing horses. And here we are now, scratching our heads and wondering where did it all go wrong.