Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

206 Twenty-First Century Populism
lower incomes become frustrated with the very visible wealth disparities in
the population. Moreover, one of the cornerstones of Social Partnership has
been to ‘co-opt’ the trade unions, which no longer play the very vocal opposition
role they once used to. While SF has secured some of this market
already, there still remains a large part of the electorate, many of whom do
not vote at all, which could be open to a populist party appealing to the
‘common working men and women’, abandoned by their representatives
and exploited by the new economic elites.
Immigration
One of the side-effects of the economic boom has been the arrival in Ireland,
for the first time in the nation’s history and over a very short period, of large
numbers of immigrants. As the preliminary results of the 2006 census show,
nearly 10 per cent of the population are nationals of other states and the
number of non-nationals in the country has nearly doubled in just four
years, from 220,000 in 2002 to over 400,000 in 2006, in large part due to
the arrivals of citizens from the new accession countries of the EU (O’Brien,
2006). While Ireland has long prided itself on being the land ‘of a hundred
thousand welcomes’, now that those arriving are not just free-spending
American tourists, but Nigerians, Poles and others in search of work, the
country’s attitudes to outsiders has noticeably changed. Using data from the
2003 Eurobarometer survey, Michael Breen (2006: 18) finds that 38.5 per
cent of Irish respondents ‘completely agreed’ that there were too many
immigrants in the country while a further 36.2 per cent ‘tended to agree’
with this. Over half of respondents also ‘completely agreed’ or ‘tended to
agree’ with the statement that immigrants are responsible for crime. As in
the UK, these attitudes have been shaped by parts of the media with the
term ‘asylum seeker’ becoming synonymous with ‘sponger’ and used to
denote all immigrants. In reality, although the number of people requesting
asylum in Ireland did rise from just 39 in 1992 to over 11,000 in 2002, this
still represented less than 10 per cent of all those coming to live in Ireland
(Loyal, 2003: 76).
The hardening of Ireland’s position towards non-nationals was highlighted
by the 2004 Citizenship Referendum to remove a constitutional
clause giving anyone born on the island of Ireland the automatic right to
Irish citizenship. Strongly backed by the PD Minister for Justice, Michael
McDowell, the referendum took place amidst talk of ‘citizenship tourists’
and accusations that maternity wards were being ‘swamped’ by African
women arriving heavily pregnant in Ireland in order to give birth and thus
acquire Irish (and hence EU) passports for their children. While no clear
evidence was offered to support these accusations beyond anecdotal
accounts, the referendum was passed with a 79 per cent vote in favour.
Given that almost every populist party discussed in this volume has sought