The turnout in the referendum in Northern Ireland today is expected to be high. The North's chief electoral officer, Mr Pat Bradley, predicted last night it would be "much higher" than in general elections.
"It's very difficult, of course, to quantify this but certainly the interest we have had, in inquiries from the public, has been immense. We have not experienced the like of it since we were set up 25 years ago. The young people particularly appear to be very keen to vote at this election," Mr Bradley said on BBC television.
A total of 1,175,741 people are entitled to vote in the referendum in the North. Polling begins at 7 a.m. today and continues until 10 p.m., at 1,228 polling stations.
All the votes will be counted at the King's Hall, Belfast, tomorrow, and Mr Bradley said the result would be known "sometime mid-afternoon to late afternoon".
Voters in the North will be asked: "Do you support the agreement reached at the multi-party talks on Northern Ireland set out in Command Paper 3883?" (the technical parliamentary term for the agreement).
In an eve-of-poll message, the Sinn Fein leader, Mr Gerry Adams, urged "a decisive Yes vote" and expressed confidence the Yes vote would secure a comfortable victory.
He appealed to undecided unionists "to put their faith in the future, not in the failures of our past". Sinn Fein was committed to a settlement that would "accommodate the rights of all our people, nationalist and unionist".
He said: "Looking into unionism today I see confusion and fear. Many in that community believe that ahead of them lies a crushing political humiliation. Many believe they are being moved into a position of second-class citizenship where they will be robbed of their identity."
Change must be managed, Mr Adams said. "That is difficult for everyone, for me, for Mr Trimble. But our future and the future of our children depend upon this generation of political leaders reaching out to each other, as equals, seeking accommodation."
The Ulster Unionist leader, Mr David Trimble, said: "We are going to do well in this referendum. We can already see that it is building. All the opinion polls at the moment indicate that we are heading for 70 per cent. And we're going to do better than that."
The UUP deputy leader, Mr John Taylor, said that since the downturn following the appearance by the Balcombe Street IRA prisoners at the Sinn Fein Ardfheis, the tide had now started to turn in favour of the Yes campaign.
The Democratic Unionist Party leader, the Rev Ian Paisley, said: "I know Northern Ireland. I have fought elections across the whole country. I want to say that people look upon this act as an act of treachery and they are not going to wear it for Gerry Adams, or David Trimble, or John Hume." Northern Ireland's largest circulation newspaper, The Belfast Tele- graph, urged a Yes vote saying that Ulster had said No on too many occasions in the past. It said the Belfast Agreement offered a chance to break free from the past and to go for the future.
President Clinton has urged the people of Northern Ireland to support the peace agreement in today's referendum, promised more trade and investment and warned against a return to violence, writes Joe Carroll Without explicitly asking people to vote Yes, the President in his statement made it clear that an endorsement of the agreement was the way to "turn the common tragedy of Northern Ireland's past into a shared triumph for the future".
He said: . . . we [the US] were blessed with the arrival of your ancestors and relatives who helped to build our nation. We want to return the favour with trade and investment, with friendship and partnership. But to those of any party or persuasion who would revert to violence, you must know that you will find no friend in America."