The fear that an Irish No to Nice will create the ideal breeding ground for an neo-fascist advance in Europe was voiced by Dr Martin Mansergh (FF).
Speaking in the debate on the Bill to facilitate the holding of a referendum on the Nice Treaty, Dr Mansergh said that Dr Jörg Haider, of the Austria Freedom Party, had spoken of left-wing politicians becoming successful only if they accepted right-wing ideas.
This politician had now collapsed the Austrian government because he wished to veto European enlargement and particularly the accession of the Chech Republic.
Dr Mansergh said he believed it would be a disaster if we had a No vote in Ireland and showed that we would delay enlargement. "I have always wanted to believe that we were broad, generous, idealistic and internationally-minded. Our honour as well as our interests are at stake. I appeal to everyone to lift the cloud over us and this time to vote, and to vote Yes".
Dr Mansergh said that if we voted against Nice, our European neighbours would conclude that we had obviously had it much too good in recent years. There was nothing intrinsically democratic about an individual veto. Nor was it an effective method of running an organisation with a lot of members. What was democratic about one member-state of four million people vetoing a treaty negotiated and agreed on behalf of 370 million people?
If Sinn Féin doubted his arguments it should reflect on its own arguments about the Unionist veto. Vetoes should only protect the most vital interests, not block progress unreasonably.
Dr Mansergh said he was distressed to think that Sinn Féin seemed to have such little sense of history that it did not appreciate the value and strategic importance of this country's full membership of the EU as an alternative to a claustrophobic relationship with Britain.
He said the European Union had provided us with a supportive framework which had levelled the playing field and enabled us to flourish. Much of this had been acknowledged even by the No side; but they wanted the European Union to evolve in political and institutional terms no further. They wanted Ireland to move across from the fast lane to the crawlers' lane and to stop all the traffic in the process. In the meantime, they wanted us to find a way around the obstruction and to catch up as best we could. It was like King Canute being told that he could hold back the tide.
Mr Joe O'Toole (Ind) warned of a danger of Ireland becoming "a slave state creature of corporate America" if we did not make the right decision on Nice.
He referred to our dependency on many aspects of the US economy, but said his fear was that because of the way things were going, if we did not make the right decision on Europe, and if we lost the support of our European colleagues and European investment, we would face the scenario that he had painted.
It was very easy to forget that there were still regimes in many parts of the US economy where workers had few, if any, protections.
In this country we needed to look at where we had progressed in these terms during the course of the last quarter of a century, because of our involvement in Europe, said Mr O'Toole, who is president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
Mr Paschal Mooney (FF) said that those who tried to frighten the Irish people with talk of a European army would do well to remember that the initiative on crisis management leading to the establishment of the European Rapid Reaction Force came from Finland and Sweden, two neutral states, and countries like Ireland which believed passionately in a non-military Europe.