Despite strong party support for immigrant candidates, there were few signs of advance, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC
FOR THE dozens of first-time candidates who contested the local elections convinced that demography and the attention of mainstream parties would herald a breakthrough for immigrant politicians, last Monday morning must have come as a letdown.
Their expectations had not been unfounded, after all. At the last local elections, in 2004, none of the main parties fielded immigrant candidates, and some unabashedly confessed they had not given the issue any thought. Six stood as independents that year, of whom two were elected. By the eve of Election ’09, however, the parties’ eagerness to exploit the new communities for support, after five years of dramatic immigration rates from eastern Europe, had resulted in a seven-fold rise in the number of immigrants standing for election.
And yet the outcome was much as it was five years ago. Of 44 immigrant candidates tracked by The Irish Times, just four were elected. Former mayor of Portlaoise Rotimi Adebari retained his seat in the town and gained one on the county council, while a Dutchman Jan Rotte won a seat for the Labour Party in Lismore, Co Waterford.
In Co Monaghan, there were two successes – for the Green Party’s Kristina Jankaitiene, a Lithuanian standing in Carrickmacross, and Fianna Fáil’s Russian candidate, Anna Rooney, in Clones. Others performed well without clinching a seat, among them Fine Gael’s Adeola Ogunsina in Mulhuddart, west Dublin, Anna Michalska of Fianna Fáil in Kilkenny, the Green Party’s Tendai Madondo in Tallaght and Labour’s Elena Secas of Labour.
What explains the failure of more candidates to make the breakthrough? One school of thought suggests that some made the mistake of running too narrow a campaign, mistakenly believing that speaking primarily to other immigrants would carry them over the line. With voter registration rates still very low among newcomers (according to Dublin City Council, there were just 15,150 people on its register who did not have the right to vote in general elections), this made little strategic sense, even in the most ethnically diverse wards.
The tactic was based on the dubious assumption that immigrants would vote for other immigrants, and that native Irish votes couldn’t be relied on. “Many immigrants don’t want to be associated with migration,” one specialist remarks. “It’s making an assumption that because a voter is black, he is going to vote black, and that’s wrong.”
The showing of Mulhuddart’s three Nigerians shows mixed transfer patterns. Fine Gael’s Adeola Ogunsina attracted 965 first preferences and is thought to have come close to topping the poll in boxes from Ongar, where he is based, suggesting he must have attracted a significant number of Irish votes. Fianna Fáil’s Idowu Olafimihan, whose campaign homed in on the African electorate, attracted 611 first preferences and was eliminated three counts earlier than Ogunsina. Just one third of Olafimihan’s votes – presumably Nigerian ones – then transferred across the civil war divide to Ogunsina. For his part, Independent Ignatius Okafor got 464 first preferences, and his transfers scattered widely. To complicate things further, local observers suggest that, even among Nigerians, the vote split along class and tribal lines.
Having a mix of Irish and non-Irish canvassers, many agree, appears to have been a feature of the most successful campaigns. Tendai Madondo, a highly regarded Zimbabwean Green candidate in Tallaght South, agrees that having Irish volunteers is important, but says fewer resources generally put immigrants at a disadvantage in a system where people generally vote for who they know.
“From a financial perspective, it is very difficult for immigrants to fundraise, which impedes advertising and leaflet distribution and those important initiatives that can put your name out there,” she says.
“Immigrants don’t have the very wide support networks that mainstream candidates would – people they went to college with, their siblings, and so on.”
For other candidates, local factors appear to have damaged their chances. Fine Gael’s Benedicta Attoh – originally from Nigeria – received 586 first preferences in Dundalk, just one vote more than she got in the 2004 local election, when she stood as an Independent.
Although she praises the support she received from party head office and her running mate, she puts the showing down partly to race. “Some party members said they were not going to vote for me because I was not from here. I thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t,” she explains. “Some of them said to me, does this mean Fine Gael could not get any local woman to stand in the elections?
“I’ve spent a quarter of my life in Dundalk, and I’ve been very involved in the community,” she says, exasperated.
Attoh’s experience was not an isolated one. Patrick Maphoso, a South African standing as an Independent in Dublin city, reported being racially abused while canvassing, while Tendai Madondo’s car was vandalised during the campaign. She also had to contend with someone approaching known supporters of hers and spreading the rumour that she had Aids, which was a lie.
“I was very disappointed,” Madondo says evenly, before stressing the genuine decency of the majority she encountered.
The parties felt one of the questions that needed answering in the election was whether running foreign candidates would provoke nativist resentment, but notwithstanding the occasional hint, most strategists agree there was limited evidence of it. Early analysis of voting patterns suggests immigrants fared poorly on transfers, and the parties don’t conceal their disappointment at how few got past the early counts, but most attribute these poor showings to other factors.
Seán Dorgan, general secretary of Fianna Fáil, says parties need to gain more understanding of the immigrant vote, but feels the experience has been valuable and expresses particular satisfaction at Anna Rooney’s success.
For Fine Gael, too, the experience has gone well, according to TD Leo Varadkar. “I’d always be of the view that a party should look like the people it represents and one of the big problems Fine Gael would have had seven to 10 years ago was that it was old, male and very rural.
“At the last general election, we made the party much younger and much more urban. Where we are still behind is that we don’t have enough women and we’re not reflecting the new ethnic make-up of the country . . .”
For those hoping immigrants can aspire to do as well as their native-born peers, the mixed election figures obscure some reassuring messages. The first is the importance of the candidate. The group of more than 40 immigrants who stood this time included just as much mediocrity as any other cohort of candidates, but in the main those who did well were able and committed.
Another clear trend is that those who excel are generally those who have already been involved in their community. Here, Rotimi Adebari is the exemplar. Before he decided to stand in Portlaoise in 2004, Adebari had already been active on the Tidy Towns Committee, set up a network for the unemployed in the town and founded a consultancy on diversity.
“He had all the credentials of a local candidate, irrespective of where he came from,” says one observer. “There’s a huge amount to learn from how Rotimi does it.”
For others, the very fact that the main parties have begun to include immigrants and invest in their potential is progress enough.
“They have proven to their children that their children can achieve anything in the State, if they want,” says one man who came here from Africa more than a decade ago. “It’s about what my children could see on those posters every time we drove anywhere. It doesn’t matter if they won or not. The fact that they were there is very significant.”