NEW FACES OF IRISH POLITICS
by Colin Murphy
Le Monde Diplomatique
nd
June 3 2009
Interest in European elections is traditionally low, but less
so in Ireland, where political and economic crises have animated
voters. Meanwhile, in local elections, also on 5 June, the immigrant
community has become a vibrant new force
"The worst thing is the war," says Anna Rooney, simply. All around her,
these past months, people have been losing jobs, closing businesses,
cutting budgets. The national conversation has been dominated by talk
of recession and straitened times.
Anna Rooney, however, has an alternative perspective. "When you
go through the war, your eyes are opened differently." Standing in
this small village on the southern side of the border with Northern
Ireland, with her local surname, hint of a local accent, and shock of
reddish hair (closer inspection shows it to be purple), an outsider
might think Rooney to be talking about what Irish people have always
euphemistically referred to as "the Troubles", the long history of
Irish civil conflict for which the border is the totem.
Rooney did grow up on a contested border, but it wasn’t this one. Hers
was in the Soviet Union. An ethnic Armenian, with a grandfather
from Ukraine, she grew up in the contested province of Abkhazia in
Georgia, later moving across the border to the Russian resort town of
Sochi. When war broke out between Abkhazian separatists and Georgia
in 1992, Rooney’s family were lucky to escape unharmed. But they were
scarred in other ways. "Suddenly, we had nothing."
They succeeded in starting over, and the experience was formative
for her. So now she says: "We can get through this crisis. Everybody
just has to find the strength." Rooney exudes strength. In the Soviet
education system, she says, they were taught to be leaders. She makes
a wry comparison with the Irish Catholic education system, in which
the Catholic sacraments mark the key staging posts of childhood: "You
have Communion and Confirmation [sacraments of initiation into the
Catholic Church]. We had the same – but with a political side to it."
A date with destiny In the late 1990s, with the internet still in its
infancy in Russia, a friend of Rooney’s put her details up on a dating
website. The first Rooney knew of it was when she was phoned one day
by an Irishman. Intrigued, she allowed him to phone her again. They
struck up an email correspondence and a relationship flourished. He
visited. Soon, she was flying to Ireland for "a weddin’" (she says
it with a local accent).
Immigration was a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland then. Rooney’s
husband ran a shop and petrol station on the town square. "People
were coming into the shop just to look at me." Many in the town
were involved with a charity that brought children from Chernobyl
to Ireland for respite and holidays, and soon Rooney found herself
translating Christmas and birthday cards from locals to their young
friends in Belarus.
Rooney’s instincts led her to get involved in local initiatives, and
her professional experience led her to set up a multilingual business
services company. Then, early this year, politics intruded. Fianna
Fáil, the party in government since 1997, asked her to stand for
them in the local elections, on 5 June.
Fianna Fáil is currently at a historic low in the polls, as the
country, and notably the media, has blamed the party for the recession,
holding it to account for the "boom and bust", pro-cyclical economic
policies that it flaunted in good times. But for Rooney, the choice
of party was reflexive. "The people who helped me when I arrived, they
all were Fianna Fáil. My choice was based on personal experience. They
asked me, and I’m honoured to be asked to represent."
She sees, too, opportunity in crisis. "Look at what’s happened the
last five years: we’re all on the go; unless you text somebody, you
can’t visit them; every minute is written down. We lost our community
values. Maybe we have to go back to ‘community’."
Behind her, the window of her shop is grimy, the newspapers on the
floor inside are old and the door is locked. A new petrol station on
the outskirts of this small town, Clones, undercut the Rooneys’ petrol
pump, and the new phenomenon of cross-border shopping, as Southerners
take advantage of the weakened British pound to buy goods cheaper
in Northern Ireland, hit shop sales. The shop closed – temporarily,
she insists.
In the meantime, there is politics, and one impact of her involvement
is a new awareness of her identity. "Until about three months ago,
I never felt that I was a ‘foreign national’." Suddenly, though,
Rooney’s own story was part of a larger one: there are an unprecedented
38 immigrants running in these local elections, from countries as
diverse as Colombia, Moldova, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.
Winning the immigrant vote For many of those candidates, their
hope of election is a forlorn one: reliant on a vote from their own
communities, they will be stifled by low voter registration amongst
immigrants generally. According to one independent candidate in
Limerick, Pat O’Sullivan (an Irishman running in large part on an
"integration" agenda), the political parties are running immigrant
candidates as "sweepers", intended to bring out an immigrant vote that
will transfer to the party’s lead candidates, while the candidates
themselves are being unfairly "led on" by the parties to believe that
they have a realistic chance.
The charge hardly applies to Rooney, who has a remarkable degree of
local involvement, and will be less reliant than many of the others
on an "immigrant vote". Still, she knows that the vote is there to
be taken, and has been involved in voter registration drives among
the immigrant communities.
With an immigrant population estimated at around 10% of the total
population, or 420,000, the political parties are belatedly awakening
to the fact that this could become an influential constituency –
particularly in the local elections, in which any registered resident
is entitled to vote. Voter registration drives have been a prominent
feature of individual candidates’ campaigns. At the last election
to Letterkenny Town Council, in the north west of the country, the
final seat was won by a margin of one vote – a striking lesson in
the importance of getting out the vote.
Michael Abiola-Phillips, running for a seat for the main opposition
party, Fine Gael, has been driving people around town to get their
voter registration forms signed and delivered on time. Abiola-Phillips
is part of a five-man team running for Fine Gael, and there is no sign
of "sweeper" cynicism here: the campaign is being run with apparent
military efficiency from a large HQ on the main street, and a long list
of housing estates on a whiteboard tells each candidate which needs
to be canvassed each night. (The length of the list is testament to
the huge economic and population growth in this traditionally remote
part of the country, during the recent "boom" years.) When not pounding
the streets of local housing estates, Abiola-Phillips is courting the
multiple local African churches, another sign of demographic change.
This he does, unusually, by day; by night, he works as a mobile
security guard, driving alone around Letterkenny’s business parks. He
returns home at 7am, sleeps for two hours, gets up to canvass, and
catches another two hours’ sleep before work that night. A former
student activist in Nigeria and a political analyst, his enthusiasm for
Irish democracy is almost infectious. Being elected, he says, would be
"a way to set the standard for other immigrants coming behind me".
Some candidates prefer to downplay their "immigrant" identity, and
portray it as incidental to their politics. More commonly, though,
the rhetoric of immigrant leadership and civic participation is
prominent. Were one to pick a place in Dublin in which to canvass and
mobilise an immigrant vote, it would be Moore Street. The city’s old
market street became in recent years a beacon of multiculturalism,
because of its unique mix of "old Dublin", working-class street
traders, and "new Irish" immigrant businesses, attracted by the
low rents.
South African Paddy Maphoso runs his security-training business from a
stand in the new mall on the street (between the mobile phone unlocking
booth and the Lithuanian supermarket), and this has become his campaign
HQ; he is running as an independent. As we talk, he accosts a passing
Irishman in a builder’s jacket, with tattoos on his forearms: a lost
cause, I assume. "I’ve voted Fianna Fáil all my life," says the man,
Kevin. "Never again. They sold us out."
By the time Maphoso is finished with him, they’ve swapped phone
numbers, and Kevin has offered to bring him canvassing in his area,
the working-class, inner-city community of Ballybough. What will
Kevin’s neighbours make of an African candidate calling to the door,
I ask. "No problem," he says. "New faces are what we need."
I watch Maphoso canvass a bewildering array of nationalities,
constantly pressing home the point, "you’re entitled to vote", as
he presses registration forms into their hands. He seems to count
each of these as a definite registration, and a likely vote, and is
confident of being elected. This area of Dublin has one of the highest
immigrant populations in the country: hypothetically, they could swing
the election. But the pleasant, noncommittal (or simply confused)
faces that I watch listen to his pitch suggest that, though there may
be an unprecedented number of immigrant candidates at this election,
there is yet to emerge a tangible immigrant constituency.
"At least I’ll be counted amongst those who tried to make a
difference," says Maphoso. "In 2009, I stood out and tried to make
â~@¨a change."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
