Yes camp lead on eve of Nice poll (FOURTH REICH ALERT)

The last opinion poll before tomorrow's Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty showed its supporters widening their lead, but low turnout and anger at having to vote twice on the same question could still lead to a dramatic upset.

> Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, implored Ireland's 1.6 million voters yesterday to look beyond self-interest and think of their duty to the less lucky nations hoping to join the European Union.

"I say to the Irish people that Saturday is a date with history, not only for us but for Europe as a whole," he said.

A Yes vote would clear the way for the admission of 10 states in 2004, mostly from eastern Europe.

It also eliminates the national veto in 30 areas, permits a two-speed Europe, brings defence into the EU ambit, and formalises the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

In other words a severe power grab by the European Commission and a huge erosion of national sovereignty. No thanks. - Ivan

While it would be legally possible for the candidate countries to join without the treaty, a No vote could unstitch a fragile compromise agreed by EU leaders in five days of bitter wrangling at Nice two years ago.

The European Commission president, Romano Prodi, said yesterday a second rejection would be a "cataclysm", but denied that he has any Plan B up his sleeve.

Major parties in Holland and Belgium are already questioning whether the applicants are fit to join. The latest poll by the Irish Times yesterday put the Yes side ahead by 13 points, with 42 per cent in favour and 29 per cent against. Almost a third were wavering or said they would not vote.

But the polls have proved wildly unreliable before. The Yes campaign had an even bigger lead of 17 points just a week before the first Nice referendum in June last year.

The government went on to lose by eight points against a rag-bag alliance of Sinn Fein, the Greens, the pro-life movement, and anti-war neutralists.

Last year's No vote hit Brussels like a thunderbolt because it came from the nation that had consistently shown the highest support for the EU.

While no one could quite pin down why it had happened, John Rogers, the former attorney-general, said it came from a gut feeling that Europe was intruding too far, too fast, on too many fronts, provoking inchoate fears that Ireland's basic character was under threat.

The Irish Independent has been running two to three pieces a day, imploring, begging, and cajoling people to vote Yes. According to them, anybody who votes "No" must be surly, backwards, and politically retarded.

Unfortunately, I have little faith that the Irish will be able to resist the media onslaught.

Here's one of today's "Vote Yes" screeds.

Nice is a moral issue and our answer should be Yes

IRISH voters tomorrow will make one of the most momentous decisions in our country's history.

The Nice referendum will have profound implications not only for our own future as a nation but for the future of Europe. It will be observed more intently than any other Irish event for generations.

If we vote Yes, the enlargement of the EU to bring in 10 more countries, mostly in Central Europe, can go ahead as planned. For them, the long nightmare of fascist and communist rule will be over. They have laboured hard for this day, making sacrifices to transform their economies. If we vote No, partial enlargement can take place in theory, but in practice there would be utter confusion.

Some Irish anti-Nice campaigners admit that, even welcome it. They claim that small countries, including candidate countries, could profit from a radical "reform".

In the real world no such thing can happen. It would involve not only the repudiation of the Nice Treaty but the unravelling of the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties, already approved by the Irish electorate. Like so many of their arguments, it is nonsense.

We have heard worse nonsense from them. It must be refuted; and it has been quite effectively refuted during the campaign. Last year's referendum failed owing to the Government's complacency. This year the Government has done its job of defending its ground and explaining the issues.

Nice is about enlargement. It is not about abortion. It is not about neutrality. It is not about immigration. It is not about losing our influence in Europe: far from it.

A No vote, not a Yes vote, would undermine our influence in Europe. A No vote would cause our representatives abroad the most acute embarrassment and loss of standing. A No vote would threaten Irish jobs, because of the effects on trade and investment.

And tomorrow's vote concerns more than economics, more than reputation. Fundamentally Nice is, as Commissioner Chris Patten says, a moral issue.

No country has benefited more from EU membership than Ireland. The impact both on our economy and on our position in the world has been revolutionary. Now countries that have suffered in ways we cannot imagine stand in line awaiting a similar chance. Are we to deny it to them?

A Yes vote tomorrow will be a vote for everything that is good about the European project. A No vote would be a vote for the chip on the shoulder, the backward step, sour begrudgery. We do not believe that the Irish people will so abuse the precious power that resides in the ballot box.

Comment

This one’s even better! A “No” vote must surely mean you’re a religious nut or an old-time communist who wants all of Ireland to live in hovels with dungheaps and no shoes!

No appeals to extremes of Right and Left

"THE GOD Squad are out in force," said the Fianna Fail deputy glumly. "They say their sons will be conscripted into the European army and their daughters forced to have abortions. You can't talk to them."

Like other people in the main parties, he found the anti-Nice lineup puzzling. Why had the conservative Catholics got into bed (figuratively speaking) with the far left and the old-time economic nationalists and sovereignty addicts?

In fact, their involvement is easy enough to understand. They have always held deep suspicions of the European enterprise, and more than once in the past their leaders said they would prefer secession from the EU to abandoning, for example, the prohibition on divorce - since repealed - in the Irish Constitution.

Matters were exacerbated for them in the wake of the "X" case a decade ago, when the Maastricht referendum and the abortion issue became hopelessly entangled. Efforts to roll back the Supreme Court judgment in the "X" case, which so infuriated the extreme conservatives, have since failed. The last occasion was the referendum in March, when a proposal to overturn the judgment was narrowly defeated.

Soon after, during the general election campaign, angry voters asked candidates what if any options remained open to them. They were intensely annoyed with the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who had given them their referendum but failed to deliver a result. Some of them intend to take it out on him now, though they have been repudiated by the mainstream Pro-Life Movement.

In addition to their view of the "social issues", they tend to share the naive and antiquated definitions of independence and sovereignty at the heart of the anti-Nice campaign.

Surprisingly large numbers of people never learn by experience. In a speech last Monday, Minister of State Tom Parlon observed that membership of the EU has given Ireland more, not less, independence. The proposition is hardly open to dispute. It has been fundamental to the policies of Irish governments since at least the 1960s. Yet anti-EU campaigners prefer paper sovereignty to a real increase in independence.

One of the oddities about their methods is that they constantly resurrect issues already settled - and give people the impression that these issues have something to do with the Nice Treaty.

In terms of public interest, the outstanding example is neutrality. But their claim in relation to monetary independence is even farther from reality. It amounts to asserting that a country without its own currency is not independent. In other words, France and Germany are not independent but Estonia is, until such time as it joins the euro. Denmark, too, is in their eyes independent, although its currency "shadows" the euro (while it has no say in eurozone economic and monetary policy.)

Among the rest of the crew, Sinn Fein have exploited the opportunity ruthlessly. The Greens have been unable to conceal their tripartite division into those who are Yes, No, and publicly No but privately Yes.

And in the same bed as the extreme right are the extreme left. Among their concerns is a possible war between Europe and the United States (no, honestly) and the provision in the Nice Treaty for privatisation of water supplies. There is no such provision, but by the same token there is no provision for abortion, conscription, or the arrival of Ireland of 750,000 immigrants.

But the strangest band in the Legion of the Noes are a handful of old-time communists. They have of course always opposed European integration, seeing it as a threat to the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union no longer exists, so what have they to gain? Do they dream that Stalin sleeps under some hillside, like Finn McCool or King Arther, awaiting the day that he will arise and lead a glorious restoration of gulags, show trials, starvation, torture and mass murder?

Presumably their comrades on the right flank dream of a different restoration: Eamon de Valera's Ireland with its happy maidens and frugal comfort, not to mention tumbledown hovels, dungheaps, poverty, unemployment, emigration and shoeless children. They deserve each other.

James Downey

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