A leading campaigner for a No vote on the Nice Treaty has said the Taoiseach and his Government have set themselves on a fateful course of defying the Irish people's will, as expressed in the outcome of the referendum.
In a statement, Mr Anthony Coughlan, secretary of the National Platform for Democracy, Independence and Neutrality, said Mr Ahern should have insisted at the EU summit in Gothenburg that the treaty be renegotiated.
This was tantamount, according to Mr Coughlan, to the Government aligning itself with other EU governments and the EU Commission in a course of action designed to "pressurise, bamboozle and deceive the Irish people into re-running the Nice referendum in order to get a Yes instead of a No to exactly the same Nice Treaty, unchanged by one iota from what the Irish people rejected 10 days ago".
Mr Coughlan claimed the Government and the other EU governments were planning to get all the other states to ratify Nice and then use that to pressurise the Irish people into voting Yes in a second referendum.
"It is essential for Irish democracy and for the hopes of a democratic EU, for the sake of all EU citizens, that that plan must fail."
The attitude towards the outcome of the referendum, Mr Coughlan added, confirmed how justified was the concern expressed frequently in the course of the Nice referendum campaign at the undemocratic way in which the EU was developing.
Mr Coughlan said by conspiring with the other EU states to continue with the Nice Treaty ratification process when this should cease at once, the Government was conducting foreign policy in defiance of the Constitution, in breach of EU law on the ratification of European treaties and in breach of the general conventions of international law governing treaty ratification processes.
Mr Coughlan said those who voted Yes to the Nice Treaty must ask themselves whether they approve of "Nice Mark 2". "For the views of Yes voters are being disregarded by the elites of Europe every bit as much as the votes of those who voted No to the Nice Treaty.
"The Yes voters need not have turned out at all: for Nice, it seems, was to be ratified eventually, whether they supported it or not."
Mr Coughlan concluded: "All democrats in Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour and the PDs who voted Yes to Nice on June 7th, will vote No to `Nice Mark 2', if that is put before them, out of respect for the Irish people's will, to uphold the integrity of the referendum process and the Irish Constitution, and for the sake of an EU that is governed by law rather than by the bullying of power elites."