The Irish people played a major part in ensuring a deal on the financing of EU enlargement by voting Yes to the Nice Treaty, the Taoiseach said last night.
Speaking after the EU 15 agreed the crucial funding package for the accession of 10 new member-states, Mr Ahern said the Yes vote had been "enormously significant in allowing the outcome we have here today".
The "main players" had all acknowledged this, he said.
The deal, safeguarding direct payments to farmers until 2006 and guaranteeing only modest reductions in their real value from 2006 to 2013, was a good outcome for Irish farmers.
"It preserves our interests in a very real way. It's a good outcome for Ireland, for the candidate countries and for the European Union."
Irish farmers should be happy, he said, because under previous agreements there had been a belief that direct payments would be phased out for Irish farmers from 2004.
However, now there would be no changes until 2006, and uncertainty had been removed.
"The last major obstacles in the path to enlargement have been cleared," he said. "We have decided the 10 candidate countries close to concluding their negotiations will be able to become members of the European Union in 2004. We hold the presidency of the European Union from 2004, and it will fall on us, therefore, to welcome the new member-states. That will be both an honour and a particular pleasure for us."
He said the experience of the Nice referendum campaign had taught him that "we need to simplify the treaties, define subsidiarity, make the EU more friendly towards the citizen and ensure it has the transparency demanded by people who said they would like to know what we were part of."
He had told his EU colleagues at the summit that "people on the streets had been talking about enhanced co-operation, they were talking about the weighting of votes. I said to my colleagues that I hoped their citizens were equally well informed."
The President of the European Parliament, Mr Pat Cox, told EU leaders that the Nice referendum result had sent a powerful and positive message: "Enlargement, and enlargement now." He said: "This clears the way for the Union's rendezvous with history." He warned they should never again let the European integration project become "dislocated from public opinion".
Speaking before the deal on the financing of enlargement was concluded, he warned against the fudging of the council's conclusions.