TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen will today urge the Fianna Fáil organisation to throw its weight behind the campaign to get the Lisbon Treaty referendum passed on June 12th.
Mr Cowen is to call on every unit of the party "to mobilise" over the next four weeks behind the Yes vote, party officials said last night.
Meanwhile, at a meeting tomorrow night of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party, at which the treaty is the only item on the agenda, he is to warn TDs and Ministers that those who do not campaign fully will face consequences.
Mr Cowen's decision to lay such a strong emphasis on a Fianna Fáil Yes campaign illustrates the dangers he recognises to his leadership of a defeat on such a major issue within five weeks of his elevation.
"Ministers and TDs will be under no doubt but that he wants them out: at every church, at every crossroads, or else face the consequences," said a Fianna Fáil figure.
Mr Cowen will go further tomorrow night and make it clear that penalties will still follow for those found not to have played their part, even if the Yes campaign wins.
The Government's battle to win the June 12th referendum was given a boost by the latest Sunday Business Postopinion poll. Published yesterday, it showed Yes support up three percentage points to 38; No support down three percentage points to 28 points; and don't knows static at 34 percentage points.
Speaking at rallies in Offaly at the weekend, Mr Cowen repeatedly emphasised the importance of securing the referendum's passage.
"Say yes to openness, yes to the new Europe and yes to the end of totalitarianism, and don't listen to those who say we will be overwhelmed," he said in Tullamore.
Mr Cowen is also expected to highlight British prime minister Gordon Brown's declaration in Belfast last week that the treaty would not affect Ireland's ability to set its own corporation tax rates.
Then, Mr Brown insisted that the British government would never have agreed to the reform treaty if it had contained such powers.
Meanwhile, launching the Labour Party's Yes campaign, leader Eamon Gilmore said: "The major challenges that Ireland now faces are increasingly global in nature, and so too are the solutions. Our membership of the European Union allows us to work with our fellow member states, to collectively confront the great challenges of our age. The Lisbon Treaty is designed to ensure that we do so more effectively."
However, he warned that the Yes campaign faced a major challenge to explain the treaty's contents.
"Even at this stage, only a month out from polling day, a lot of people aren't quite clear about the content. And there has been a fair degree of misinformation spread around."
Questioned on the greater use of majority voting that would be allowed if the treaty was passed, he said: "I think it is common sense that if you increase the membership of any body from 15 to 27, you have to make some rules in the way it makes decisions. You can't have a situation where every individual state has a veto on everything."
Labour Dublin MEP Proinsias de Rossa admitted there were elements of the treaty that were "not perfect" in the party's view. "The key thing about the treaty is that it is a compromise," he added.
Four Fianna Fáil MEPs - Brian Crowley, Liam Aylward, Seán Ó Neachtáin and Eoin Ryan - have called on farmers to back the treaty.
A No vote would damage farmers' own interests and send out a message that Ireland was taking "a more detached and isolated approach", said MEP Brian Crowley.
Mr Aylward said Ireland needed to maintain a tight alliance with France, which is leading work on a reform of the Common Agriculture Policy. Last Friday French agriculture minister Michel Barnier, speaking in Dublin, made it clear France would veto the current world trade talks offer.