No vote 'could lead to more immigrants'

A vote against the Nice treaty could lead to more migration to Ireland, the secretary-general of the European Commission has said.

At a meeting in Dublin yesterday, Mr David O'Sullivan said the failure of the EU to enlarge was more likely than enlargement to produce the sort of pressures which could provoke migration flows to Ireland.

Mr O'Sullivan, the most senior official of the European Commission, said it was the loss of hope which prompted people to leave their homes. Enlargement of the union would bring hope, he said.

The head of the commission services, he is the most senior Irish official in the history of the State's membership of the EU.

Responding to a question about the appropriateness of a civil servant becoming engaged in the debate on Nice, Mr O'Sullivan insisted he was "not telling people how to vote" but describing facts as seen in Brussels.

As a commission official, "I don't entirely lose the right to personal views," he insisted.

On the economic front, Mr O'Sullivan said, there were numerous economic analyses which concluded that the benefits of enlargement outweighed the costs. Ireland's exports to the 10 candidate countries had grown from €160 million in 1994 to €1,190 million in 2000.

He said he "abhorred some of the racist undertones which can accompany discussion of these issues". Immigration "is a positive source of dynamism and skills renewal", he argued, insisting that previous enlargements showed that fears of a sudden influx were unlikely to be well-founded.

"People's natural reflex is to stay in their own country. As we know from bitter national experience, they leave when they lose hope in the ability of that country to provide them and their families with a decent future.

"Indeed, not enlarging now would actually lead to economic difficulties and increased pressure for migratory flows," he said.

Although he was reluctant to get drawn into a debate on the consequences of a No vote - "there are many more reason for voting Yes than for not voting No" - he argued that a No vote would be a "significant blow to enlargement".

It would not only compromise a tight calendar for enlargement but the complex political compromise which made the treaty.

"The reality is that the Nice Treaty is part of the political process leading to enlargement. This has required complex discussions and compromises both among the 15 member-states themselves and with the candidate countries.

"The contents of the Nice Treaty therefore form an essential part of the political consensus that was forged between the 15, elements that some see as 'non-essential' are essential to others in order to make the overall package palatable.

"Undoing Nice would therefore mean going back to square one, not simply on the technical aspects of making enlargement happen, but on the political agreements surrounding it. And we should be under no illusions - this would not be an easy mess to untangle," Mr O'Sullivan said.

Any reopening of "Pandora's box" in the form of a renegotiation, he warned, would not necessarily leave Ireland in a better position.

"To those who say that Ireland risks losing its hard-won independence through participation in a more integrated Europe, I reply that there is no greater demonstration of just how much Irish sovereignty has been enhanced by membership of the EU than the power which the country now has over the ratification of the Nice Treaty.

"Could those who marched out in 1916 ever have imagined that the sovereign state they fathered would some 80 years later hold in its hand the key to the future of the entire continent?" he asked.