Font Resize
Cowen said he was confident a majority would vote Friday for the Lisbon Treaty, a painstaking negotiated 2006 agreement already backed by the parliaments of all other EU members. Ireland alone requires the complex document to win support in a grass-roots referendum—a test it has already failed once.
Cowen, who canvassed for "yes" votes at a shopping center in his rural constituency southwest of Dublin, said Irish and European leaders had done all they could to reassure voters following the treaty's surprise defeat in June 2008.
Anti-treaty campaigners from the left and right fringes of politics reject all those assurances. They insist an emboldened EU would force Ireland to cut its wages, raise taxes, introduce abortion and euthanasia, and conscript young Irishmen into an evolving European army.
All sides emphasize the potentially fatal blow that treaty rejection would deal to Cowen's deeply unpopular government amid Ireland's worst economic crisis since the 1930s.
"We face a clear choice on Friday," Cowen said. "Will we move forward together with Europe or will we take an uncharted and more uncertain road?"
Cowen ruled out staging a third vote. He warned that a second "no" when the votes are counted Saturday would produce "a period of
More than 3 million people are eligible to vote in the country of 4.4 million—meaning that, once again, a tiny fraction of the EU's nearly 500 million residents will determine whether the treaty's reform plans can become law.
The Lisbon Treaty proposes to make it easier for European summits to reach policy decisions by majority rather than unanimous votes; create new posts of president and foreign minister for promoting EU policies on the world stage; and give both national legislatures and the European Parliament more say in shaping and approving policies.
All recent opinion polls suggest that the "yes" vote will prevail this time, in part because of stronger campaigning by the government, major opposition parties and leading celebrities from business, sports and the arts.
Also boosting the pro-treaty side is the EU's decision, following the 2008 defeat, to drop plans to prune the number of ministers in the European Commission, the powerful executive branch.
The cuts would have meant that all smaller members, including Ireland, would have lost the right to hold a commission post for five of every 15 years. This time, however, voting "yes" ensures that all members will keep at least one seat at the top EU table.
Declan Ganley, a millionaire businessman whose anti-treaty Libertas movement helped deliver Ireland's 53.4 percent "no" vote in 2008, forecast a second defeat for the Lisbon formula.
Ganley said voters in France and Holland—who in 2005 shot down the EU's previous treaty, a full-fledged constitution—were looking to the Irish to force EU chiefs to draft yet another treaty with directly elected EU leaders at its heart. He said the Lisbon Treaty threatened to give Brussels more powers to overrule the Irish, a claim bitterly disputed by most politicians here.
"We have to reject it, go back to the drawing board, and then come back with a better plan," Ganley told The Associated Press. "The Irish people are not going to be taken for fools, and as pro-Europeans, we'll vote this thing down."
