Under the slogans "If you don't know, vote No" and "No to NATO, No to Nice", and with posters depicting a wounded soldier being carried from the battlefield, the Peace and Neutrality Alliance (PANA) opened its campaign against the Treaty of Nice in Dublin yesterday.
PANA is an umbrella group of organisations in favour of retaining Irish neutrality and using the UN rather than the EU or NATO for Irish peacekeeping missions.
The PANA chairman, Mr Roger Cole, said it was seeking a protocol to the treaty to exclude Ireland from the Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) established by the EU. The Government has pledged 850 soldiers. The RRF is to be 60,000-strong, but according to Mr Cole the need to rotate soldiers meant this would be closer to 250,000.
He accused the Government of rushing the referendum. "The Treaty of Nice doesn't have to be ratified until the end of 2002," he said.
He expressed scepticism about the Government's claim that it would only sanction Irish participation in RRF operations with a UN mandate. "All we have is the word of the politicians," he said.
These were the same politicians who promised a referendum on participation in the NATO-linked Partnership for Peace, but this promise was not kept,
He said the RRF had "strong links" to NATO and participation would be increasingly costly to the Irish taxpayer. RRF tasks would included "peace-making", but Mr Cole noted that as Mr John Bruton had pointed out in the Dail, this was difficult to distinguish from war-making.
PANA would be distributing 100,000 leaflets favouring a No vote in conjunction with the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Mr Cole recalled that the President of the European Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, had said to the European Parliament: "Are we all clear that we want to build something that can aspire to be a world power?"
"There is ample time for re-negotiation," Mr Cole said. When asked what PANA would do if the treaty were defeated and a new version submitted with a protocol excluding Ireland from the RRF, he said that it would have to be examined.
If it were satisfactory, then in all probability the organisation would not campaign against the treaty a second time, although this would be a decision for the national executive.
"If you have a force of 60,000 these lads can be sent anywhere," he said. "We have been here before. We were part of a world power." Despite the jargon, people understood the implications of the proposals they were voting on in the referendum. "They don't want to die for Europe," he said.
When it was put to him that Irish participation in the RRF would be on a "case-by-case basis", Mr Cole said the EU would demand that the Irish be "good Europeans" and support whatever operation was envisaged.
Ms Carol Fox, research officer of PANA, expressed frustration at what she described as the unwillingness of the treaty's supporters to debate the issues. "We would like the Yes side to take on our arguments," she said.