Ireland went to the polls yesterday in a referendum being dubbed a "date with history" because a "yes" victory will open the way to a unified Europe.
The turnout is crucial and both sides were canvassing frantically on Friday night to get electors to use their votes on the EU's Nice treaty. The tense finale is being closely watched across the rest of Europe.
The latest opinion poll showed a comfortable lead of 42 percent for the yes camp against 29 percent for the no side.
Efforts to win over the 19 percent still undecided were continuing, backed by warnings of the danger of complacency.
"There is still all to play for and we will be canvassing right up until the polls close," said Ian McClure of Fianna Fail, the party headed by the prime minister, Bertie Ahern.
"It seems obvious to me that the `yes' camp are going to win," said a gloomy Paul O'Loughlin, a shop assistant and anti-abortion activist with the rightwing `No to Nice' campaign, distributing leaflets in Dublin city center.
Sinn Fein, the best-organized group in the no camp, said it was planning to bus voters to polling stations in the 42 constituencies.
Pressure groups and politicians on both sides of Ireland's great European debate hope that the unprecedented step of holding a referendum on a Saturday will help bring out more of the 2,923,910 electors than last year.
A turnout over 45 percent is expected to give certain victory to the well-organized and generously-funded pro-EU coalition of mainstream political parties, industry and trade unions.
Voters are being asked for the second time whether they approve of the 90-page, highly legalistic and laboriously negotiated treaty.
The Nice Treaty Hammered out at an EU summit in December 2000, it sets out the reforms of the 15-member bloc's institutional framework needed for its enlargement. Key points Redistributes voting rights in the Council of Ministers, taking into account more countries' populations. The result weakens the positions of major EU states Germany, France, Italy and Britain. Increases the size of the European parliament from 626 to 732 members. Expands the commission, the EU's executive arm. Currently Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain each have two commissioners in the 20-member body. Under Nice each member state would have one commissioner. Source: AFP
Its finer details were agreed at the French Riviera summit in December 2000, when four days of ill-tempered haggling finally produced the reform of voting weights, institutional arrangements and national vetoes needed to prevent a deadlock in an enlarged EU of 25 members.
"Yes" campaigners say that Ireland has a duty to extend to east European newcomers the benefits that transformed it from a backward, peripheral country when it joined in 1973 to the roaring Celtic Tiger of the 1990s.
The eight ex-communist countries, now democracies with market economies, along with Cyprus and Malta, "deserve the luck of the Irish," said Albert Reynolds, a former prime minister.
"Nice is a moral issue and the answer should be `yes,'" the Irish Independent newspaper said in a front-page editorial yesterday.
In June last year, when the first referendum was held, only 997,826 voted, a 34.8 percent turnout, of whom 46 percent said yes and 54 percent no after an indifferent campaign by a complacent government.
The calling of the second vote has infuriated the anti-Nice groups and underlined complaints about a lack of democracy in the EU.
Ireland has a unique constitutional requirement to hold a referendum on the treaty, which has to be ratified by all 15 member states before it can take effect.
The sense of drama is palpable, because it is clear that EU will be plunged into a constitutional crisis involving scores of millions of people if a few thousand Irish voters reject the treaty again.
RSS