The former Taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald said yesterday that a No result in next Saturday's Nice Referendum would put at serious risk all the goodwill that successive Irish governments have built up within Europe over the last 30 years.
In a paper presented at a conference entitled "The Future Of Europe After Enlargement" organised in Derry by the SDLP, Dr FitzGerald said that a No result would "be seen as having pulled up the drawbridge to keep them [the applicant countries] out of the castle within which we have done so well for ourselves".
Dr FitzGerald said the 10 applicant countries had turned their economies upside down in order to qualify for membership.
"We would need to be very selfish and hard-hearted to reject the treaty designed to accommodate these democratic countries, and we would need to have an extraordinarily strong reason to vote against it, for if we wreck the enlargement of the Community, we shall instantly lose the friendship of our 14 partners and of the 10 applicants for me