The European Commission has made its strongest appeal yet for a Yes vote in next week's referendum on the Nice Treaty.
The Commission President, Mr Romano Prodi, told the European Parliament that the treaty's ratification was essential if the EU is to accept 10 new member-states in 2004.
"The Nice Treaty is crucial and cannot be sidestepped. So I have confidence in the Irish electorate, which will be voting on the treaty in a few days. I hope that the historic objective of unifying our continent will not be overturned by this vote," he said.
The Commission yesterday approved a report recommending that Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta should complete accession talks in December and join the EU in 2004.
The 10 candidate countries have adopted more than 80,000 pages of EU laws to prepare for membership and have introduced radical economic reforms.
But the Enlargement Commissioner, Mr Guenter Verheugen, warned that a second Irish rejection of Nice could still wreck the enlargement process.
"If the Treaty of Nice is rejected in Ireland again, I don't know how we can continue with enlargement. I don't even know whether we can continue," he said.
The proposed enlargement in 2004 would be the fifth and most ambitious expansion since the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Federation in 1951. It would add 75 million people to the 400 million already living in the EU, but the increase of population by nearly 20 per cent adds no more than 5 per cent to the Union's wealth.
Yesterday's report notes that Bulgaria and Romania have set 2007 as a target date to join the EU and promises that the Commission will do all it can to ensure that this timetable is met.
But it says that recent political reforms in Turkey do not go far enough. It calls on Ankara to remove restrictions on freedom of expression, of peaceful assembly and of religion, and to establish civilian control of the military.
Despite the green light yesterday's report gives to 10 candidates, it puts prospective new members on probation.
A clause in the accession treaties would facilitate the suspension of EU membership for any country that distorts the EU's internal market. This measure could also be applied to existing member-states but it could only be used within the first two years after the new member-states join the EU.
The President of the European Parliament, Mr Pat Cox, called on Irish voters to remove "one of the last bricks in the Berlin Wall" by facilitating the admission of new member-states to the EU.
"It is now clear that 10 states are ready. It is an illusion that a treaty designed to accommodate five more members is adequate for Europe's future tasks.
"The importance of ratifying the Nice Treaty, with its necessary institutional changes, is underlined and confirmed by today's report," he said.
Mr Cox said he was confident that Irish voters were more aware of the issues at stake in this referendum than when they voted on Nice last year and he predicted a Yes vote next week.
The Fine Gael MEP Ms Avril Doyle called on voters to focus on the essential purpose of the Nice Treaty and not to be distracted by domestic political issues.
"The question you will be asked on the 19th of October has nothing to do with Bertie, the Flood tribunal, agricultural prices, college fees . . . It is about extending the same opportunities that were extended to us in 1973, to those countries in Central and Eastern Europe so long denied self-determination, and to allow them rejoin the European family. Their future and prosperity depends on it," she said.
In an impassioned intervention in the European Parliament, Fianna Fáil MEP Mr Gerard Collins called on European Greens to urge their Irish counterparts to drop their opposition to the treaty.
"Let's put the truth to the people that the Nice Treaty must be accepted if enlargement is to happen," he said.
