Summer school: The Irish referendum on the proposed EU Constitution should be deferred until the UK had voted on it first, according to the leading Euro-sceptic, Mr Anthony Coughlan.
He said at the weekend that if Ireland were to accept the Constitution and the UK then rejected it, partition would be entrenched at a time when both parts of the island should be coming together.
Speaking in Dublin at the annual summer school in memory of the historian, C. Desmond Greaves, Mr Coughlan said: "Whatever one's views on the desirability or otherwise of this EU Constitution, we should not vote until after Britain and Northern Ireland have done so, for the UK is quite likely to reject it."
He pointed out that the three largest parties in Northern Ireland - the DUP, Sinn Féin and UUP - were all opposed to "one or other aspect" of the EU Constitution.
"We should not do as we did in relation to the euro - join the eurozone on the assumption that the UK would join too within a couple of years.
"That decision has given a new dimension to the North-South border, and left us in the position of using the currency of an area with which we do only one-third of our trade.
"For the South to seek to put itself under the jurisdiction of an EU Constitution while the North stayed with Britain outside it, would add an extra dimension to partition at a time when North and South should be coming closer together, as envisaged in the Good Friday Agreement," Mr Coughlan said.
Mr Roger Cole of PANA (Peace and Neutrality Alliance) pointed out that, since the vote on the Amsterdam Treaty, there had been a "plateau" of 37 to 38 per cent opposition to further EU integration.
There was a 38.3 per cent 'No' vote on Amsterdam in 1998, followed by 53.1 per cent rejection of the Nice Treaty in the 2001 referendum, and 37.1 per cent opposition to Nice in the second poll in 2002.
He hoped the EU Constitution would be put to a vote on the same day in both parts of the island.
"Since the latest MRBI survey showed that 51 per cent of the people in the 26-county Republic want more independence from the EU, and since the vast majority of the people living in the six counties support parties that have declared their opposition to the EU Constitution, then a victory, as in Nice 1, a decisive no vote in an all-Ireland referendum, is a perfectly reasonable and achievable objective.
"The EU Constitution is another Act of Union. It destroys the legal basis for Irish national independence in the same way the Act of Union with the British Empire did at the end of the 18th century.
It is the European Union, rather than the British Union, which is now the main opponent of Irish independence and democracy," Mr Cole said.