POLAND: The head of the Government's Nice Treaty campaign has urged Warsaw to learn from Ireland's mistakes to ensure Polish voters say Yes to EU accession.
But the appeal from Mr Dick Roche, Minister for State, comes as domestic political squabbles and a bribery scandal threaten to overshadow the Polish referendum in June.
"We were seduced by positive opinion polls, and I think you [the Polish government] are going to face the same," Mr Roche said at a conference yesterday.
Some two-thirds of Poles say they will vote to join the EU, but there is a danger that less than 50 per cent of voters will turn out, rendering the poll invalid.
Organisers of yesterday's conference thanked Irish voters for voting in favour of the Nice Treaty, "symbolically removing the last brick of the Berlin Wall just as Poles helped remove the first brick".
Mr Roche called Ireland's first Nice referendum a "disaster" and said he had not planned on accepting sole responsibility for a second No vote.
"I didn't intend to fall on my sword. I intended to blame others and had already picked out my victims," he said. Asked later who his intended victims were, he replied: "The Irish Times. The Irish Times. The Irish Times."
He urged the Polish government to create "an emotional relationship between the EU and voters by connecting voting Yes to rationality".
Prof Brigid Laffan, Jean Monnet Professor of European Politics at UCD, called for pro-EU political and civil groups in Poland to collaborate closely.
The harmony among the Yes side during Ireland's second Nice campaign was a crucial part in the successful outcome.
The road to the referendum in Poland has become more treacherous as a result of the domestic difficulties facing the Prime Minister, Mr Leszek Miller. He is leading a minority government after ejecting a coalition partner for voting against the government on new taxes to improve Poland's roads.
Another growing distraction is a scandal in which Poland's leading media company has said it was offered a chance to influence new media legislation in its favour in exchange for a $17.5 million bribe.
Authorities are questioning the man who made the approach after he implied he was acting on behalf of high-ranking government officials.
The scandal has caused political sparks after the President, Mr Aleksander Kwasniewski, suggested at the weekend that Mr Miller had made "serious mistakes" over his handling of the scandal.
Mr Lech Nikolski, the Polish minister leading the EU information campaign, called for an end to the political wrangling yesterday, saying "the players on the Yes side should not get in each others' way".
"The attitudes of Poles to enlargement are unrelated to the difficulties of the exchequer and changes on the political scene," he told The Irish Times, predicting a Yes vote in the referendum scheduled for June 9th.
However, senior government officials are less confident about the outcome, saying the government has left it too late to launch a proper information campaign.
The farther from Warsaw, the less information available about the EU, one official said, leaving millions of rural voters prime targets for the scare tactics of Poland's anti-EU groups.
An invalid referendum result could result if less than 50 per cent of Poles come out to vote. The parliament can overrule such a vote, but that would taint Poland's EU accession and give anti-EU groups a stick with which to beat the current and future governments.