Hero Walesa pleads for Yes vote

THE hero of the Polish Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, yesterday made an impassioned plea to the Irish people to vote Yes to Nice this Saturday.

The man who led the inspirational movement which ousted totalitarian regimes across the former East Bloc in the 1980s, said he believed the ordinary people had emerged victorious from the 40-year Cold War.

But he said that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a period of official neglect of the fledgling democracies and market economies had dominated international politics.