The most interesting aspect of the referendum on citizenship is not so much that some of the finest minds in government thought it a good idea, but that a significant element of the commentating classes appears to see it as a cunning political stroke. This belief appears to be based on the idea that the closets of middle Ireland are jam-packed with crypto-racists, dying to come out, writes John Waters
This is nonsense. There is very little racism in Ireland, and astonishingly little considering that we learned much of what we know about life at the knee of the most racist power on the planet. There is, yes, some public concern about the drift of public policy on immigration and asylum-seekers, but this is mainly down to fear of the unknown, and will not translate into support for the change.
There is an amount of what passes for racism to be found in lounge bars, but this is unlikely to convert into a significant electoral currency. Those who voice racist slogans from high stools are likely - come polling day as every other day - to be too busy poisoning what's left of their brains to be bothered with voting.
The referendum will be roundly defeated, and the reasons should be obvious to anyone who has lived here for more than a year or two. Most Irish people currently eligible to vote are either returned emigrants, the children of returned emigrants or the surviving kin of departed emigrants who never came back. Moreover, it is less than a generation since Irish people lined up at their teachers' desks to give their pennies to the black babies.
To ask them now, loophole or no loophole, to snatch passports from the grasp of the babies of the black babies is a little too much for this breed of white man. Whatever the rights and wrongs of immigration policy, there is no hope of getting people to transcend these connections, even in the privacy of the polling booth.
This referendum is an act of folly arising from ignorance of the Irish personality. The key to this foolishness resides in the personality of the referendum's architect, Michael McDowell, an extremely intelligent, deeply rational man, who is completely incapable of imagining a mindset less rational than his own.
Mr McDowell says this is a simple matter of an anomaly in the Constitution that enables citizenship to be exploited. His arguments, at a technocratic level, are convincing. Politically, even, it is possible to perceive why he thinks he has come up with a straightforward solution to an obvious problem. He will, no doubt, have become conscious recently of unease in the public undergrowth about the drift of policy on these matters in the absence of meaningful debate.
The entire discussion about immigration has been hijacked by pseudo-liberals evincing a bogus compassion, as a way of advertising their alleged moral superiority and progressiveness. In truth, there is nothing either moral or progressive about their fudge of sanctimony and pretend-multiculturalism, a sorry mix of condescension and stupidity.
"Multiculturalism" is an oxymoron. The head of the British Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, calling recently for a reassertion of "a core of Britishness", said: "The word is not useful, it means the wrong thing . . . Multiculturalism suggests separateness. We are now in a different world. What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society . . ."
Many Irish people will relate to this sentiment. But, caught between the liberal bullies and a tiny minority of extremist bigots, the average citizen has had to stay silent.
It is understandable that politicians and leader-writers with a poor grasp of the psychodynamics of Irish life would have thought this referendum a popular ploy.
But the outcome will demonstrate what Mr McDowell, among others, has never been able to grasp: people do not always act rationally, and sometimes will act contrary even to their own interests, out of compassion, guilt or shame.
All three qualities will be at play in this campaign. Guilt because the charge of racism is taken so seriously in this society that the vast majority will be anxious to rebut it. Any antagonism some people may feel towards what they perceive to be self-inviting outsiders will operate perversely to defeat the referendum. People worry about being swamped by immigrants, but also feel guilty about such feelings. Hence, shame. And when you bring immigration down to a one-to-one - the Nigerian and the Paddy sitting side-by-side on the bus, all issues of a theoretical nature rinse down to the potential connection between two people who have found the world a fairly inhospitable place. Hence, compassion arising from empathy.
This is the kind of stuff no opinion poll will pick up. The former US Congressman, Bruce Morrison, last week expressed a worry that the referendum invites people "to exercise their worst instincts rather than their best". His concerns are unfounded. The amendment, if it goes ahead at all, will be defeated three to one.