The Sinn Féin president, Mr Gerry Adams, has warned of a "two-tier, avant-garde style" Europe if the Nice Treaty is ratified.
Speaking in Galway yesterday prior to addressing a public meeting on the issue, he also challenged Government assertions that the Seville Declaration protected Irish neutrality. This was "totally and utterly false", he said.
This Government should have followed the Danish example, and secured a protocol, rather than a declaration, he said.
Mr Adams also challenged Fine Gael to explain why it was advocating support for a treaty which it had originally described as a "disaster".
Responding to recent criticism by Fine Gael Connacht-Ulster MEP, Mr Joe McCartin, of the Sinn Féin/Green Party alliance against the treaty, Mr Adams said he did not wish to engaged in a verbal battle. However, if Sinn Féin had decided the treaty was a disaster at the outset, it would now be asking the electorate to support it. "We should be going for the best option possible, and I think that is crystal clear around the neutrality issue. The Danish people got a protocol, the Irish people get a declaration."
The fact that the Government had "totally ignored" the result of the last referendum was a clear reason for people to vote "No" again, he said.
"I just can't imagine a situation if the Germans, French or British had voted no, that their government would have gone ashamedly to the EU and said our people got it wrong," he added.
"Our concerns about the treaty are about neutrality because the treaty itself is about how the EU will be governed," he said "We need a referendum because the changes in the way the EU is governed are so fundamental.
"I have no doubt that that people in the Yes camp might be benign on these issues - that they are not perhaps warmongers or elitist. But there are, within the more powerful states, federal Europeans who want to see a united states of Europe with a united European government and with a European army."
The Council for the West says it is recommending a Yes vote. The decision was taken on the basis that the treaty "is on balance in the best interests of the west region and the country as a whole".
