The European Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs said in Dublin yesterday she was shocked at suggestions that Ireland would be flooded with immigrant workers if the Nice Treaty were ratified.
Ms Anna Diamantopoulu, from Greece, was attending a conference of the Dublin-based European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.
"These two days I am in Ireland, I have seen in some newspapers some terrible figures that really shocked me about the perspective about the 'flood of immigrants' who could reach Ireland," she told a news conference.
She continued: "There are two different issues. First, we have the experience of the past. We have Spain, Portugal, Greece, who joined Europe. They were poor countries, they were countries with very high unemployment rates and there were so many discussions in the past in France about floods of Spaniards who would enter the French labour market.
"Nothing happened, because the European approach and the national approach is to develop their own countries and to keep their workers there.
"The second issue is that we have already carried out studies, different studies but with more or less the same result. I am not going to present figures, because there are so many figures in the air I don't like to add one more. But according to these figures there is not going to be any dramatic change, or any dramatic figures of floods of people in Europe."
She stressed that Ireland's EU partners respected the sovereign will of the Irish electorate.
"In Europe, of course, we are all looking at Ireland and we are waiting for your decision. But at the same time I would say that everybody respects - these are democratic societies - the right of Irish people to decide about their future and about the European future," she said.
In an address to the conference on "Europe's Social Model - Building for the Future", Ms Diamantopoulu said one of the key factors behind Ireland's economic success was its skilled, highly educated workforce which was "the direct result of a high-quality and inclusive education system".
On EU enlargement, she said if offered the possibility to create, "not an imperial global power, as in the past, but a new, peaceful, Europe".
The SIPTU general president, Mr Des Geraghty, said: "It seems almost inconceivable that Irish workers or trade unions could ignore the major social and economic gains that membership of the EU, and the development of European law and the European social model, have brought us over the last three decades; or that we would now seek to deny extension of these benefits to other workers in Europe."