The Belfast Agreement could stop the "haemorrhaging of our best young people" from the North and offer them the chance to lead normal lives for the first time, the Ulster Unionist leader, Mr David Trimble, said yesterday.
Putting the emphasis on young people, he said new arrangements contained in the agreement offered opportunities for everybody. "That will enable us to reverse this haemorrhaging of our best young people by offering them economic opportunities. This is the future we ought to build, and failure to take this opportunity will mean stagnation and the loss of opportunity," Mr Trimble said.
He said he would be in favour of the party fielding more women candidates in the assembly elections.
Ms Kate Hoey, a Labour MP, supported Mr Trimble at the UUP press briefing, as did Lord Cranborne of the Conservative Party.
On the campaign trail yesterday, Ms Brid Rodgers of the SDLP said people could transform the pact into a people's agreement. "The dinosaurs of unionism and republicanism who are together opposing the agreement, whether in the familiar roar, in intellectual bigotry, or in bankrupt and inflammatory rhetoric or violence are offering no gain and more pain."
Mr David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party said those in the No campaign had offered no rational or reasonable alternative. "It is truly a battle between old and new unionism."
The outgoing chairman of the Institute of Directors in Northern Ireland, Mr Alan McClure, said he would be voting Yes because to vote No would be to sentence more of his countrymen and women to death. "I will vote Yes because I believe it is our only hope." He said that over the past 30 years the North had inherited "3,000 gravestones and communities gasping for jobs that should have been ours". The institute, he said, could not instruct members how to vote.
The Women's Coalition has accused the No campaign of "sinking to new depths" with a poster showing a woman wiping a tear from her eye one year after the referendum. Ms Pearl Sagar said: "By using the words `bribed and brainwashed' the ad implies that women are not capable of thinking for themselves." Ms Sagar said a strong No vote would only play into the hands of those "who have said all along that unionists do not want to work with nationalists".
Families Against Intimidation and Terror (FAIT) said it was disgusted at the United Unionists' ad campaign because it "blatantly exploited the issue of punishment beatings".
The Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre also called for a Yes vote, saying it was "the best chance and probably the only chance we are ever going to get".
A group of senior medical professionals from various hospitals in the North have also publicly supported the agreement, saying they had seen too many people with severe injuries and had to tell too many people their relatives had died. "It is our heartfelt wish that we will not have to do this any more," they said.