October 16, 2002	Wednesday	Sha’aban 9, 1423

DUBLIN: Of all the factors at play in determining Ireland’s forthcoming verdict on the European Union’s Nice Treaty, immigration could yet turn out to be the wild card.

With just days to go before the country votes for the second time on the bloc’s key enlargement document — after a shock rejection last year — polls suggest the pro-treaty camp has the lead, but that the result is by no means a dead certainty.

Raised early in the “No to Nice” campaign to defeat the treaty — which reforms the EU to admit 12 new members, mostly from Eastern Europe — the idea that Ireland could be overwhelmed by job-seeking immigrants has refused to go away.

Despite alienating anti-treaty allies as accusations of xenophobia exploded from the ‘yes’ camp, and triggering widespread media criticism, “No to Nice” has stuck to its guns and reported “good feedback” on the issue around the country.

How this feedback will be affected by revelations that “No to Nice’s” highest-profile campaigner attended rallies of a neo-Nazi political party in Germany remains to be seen, but the ‘yes’ side is understandably jubilant.

Political analysts are divided on how much impact the spectre, however unlikely, of marauding hordes of Eastern Europeans pouring into Ireland as its once-mighty “Celtic Tiger” economy grinds to a halt might have on the result of Saturday’s referendum.

“It’s one of the big unknowables about this, but once you raise the immigration issue it’s like a genie out of a bottle,” Dan O’Brien of the Economist Intelligence Unit said.

“If people who are only vaguely interested in politics have it in their minds a long way ahead of the vote that this will lead to being inundated with Poles and Romanians and so on, that’s all they simply need to know and they’ll switch off for the rest of the debate.”

Ben Tonra, EU policy analyst at University College Dublin, questioned whether it was a major consideration.

NEW FACES: Racism is a touchy subject in Ireland, which has long projected itself as the land of “Cead Mile Failte” (a Hundred Thousand Welcomes).

Historically more used to seeing people leave to seek their fortunes overseas, the once-impoverished country has experienced a massive influx of immigrants in recent years — mostly from Nigeria and Romania — in tandem with an unprecedented boom.—Reuters