The category ‘immigrant’ has been systematically substituted for the category ‘worker’, only to be supplanted in its turn by the category of the ‘clandestine’ or illegal alien. First workers, then immigrants, finally illegal aliens. If we insist that we are actually talking about workers - and whether they have worked, are working, or no longer work, doesn’t represent a subjective difference - it is to struggle against this unceasing effort to erase any political reference to the figure of the worker. - Alain Badiou[1]

There seems little doubt that in terms of political debate in Ireland the topic of immigration is one that many people wish to avoid dealing with in any depth. Yet, in our rapidly changing country, from broke, to boom to bust, it is referred to almost constantly, often rather heatedly. One would imagine that with a topic so often discussed that a certain amount of clarity would be available on the issue.

But this is not the case. On the one hand it is described as being something positive for Ireland, where the diversity of cultures and the expansion of the workforce are seen as positive boons for a society that is maturing, both in terms of moving away from a monoculture towards greater cultural multiplicity and as a sign of a dynamic and expanding economy.

On the other it is seen as presenting a problem for a society worried about the dilution of its identity when faced with the complexity of ‘multiculturalism’. While politicians and commentators differ on how big a problem this is, Fianna Fail TD Chris Andrews’ comments during the recent post Lisbon debate in the Dail presents the official concern most starkly. Andrews’ comments were made as number of TDs suggested that concerns about immigration were partly responsible for the No vote, with Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath suggesting that throughout the campaign immigration was a “subtle undercurrent” that was “lurking in the background”.

Andrews insisted that is wasn’t ‘lurking’. Instead it was:

“very much on its hind legs and about to cause severe problems unless we deal with it.... Read article » I do not believe for one minute that the Irish are racist, but we must speed up the appeals process. When people have no further recourse to the law, we must deport them quickly. Multiculturalism is not the way forward and strict integration is the best option. When one considers the examples of France and England, one will realise diversity has brought considerable problems. Ireland must address this matter.”

This view is not restricted to Fianna Fail politicians.

During the debate Labour’s Joan Burton saw immigration as an issue that was “profoundly disturbing for both women and men”. Mary Harney also suggested that it was an issue on the doorstep in ‘some working-class parts of Dublin’, while Lucinda Creighton of Fine Gael claimed it was a nationwide problem.

Well before the Lisbon vote though, concern about the dangers of multiculturalism were expressed by both Labour and Fine Gael during the controversy over the wearing of the Hijab in public schools. Both implied that ‘integration’ means that the Government should prohibit the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools.

Ruairi Quinn argued:

“If people want to come into a western society that is Christian and secular, they need to conform to the rules and regulations of that country... Read article » Nobody is formally asking them to come here. In the interests of integration and assimilation, they should embrace our culture”

Which seems to be more about assimilation than integration. However, this entire debate about immigration, multiculturalism and integration is extraordinary shallow, with little real interest being expressed in what it all means. As the Irish Times immigration correspondent Ruadhán Mac Cormaic suggested in a recent opinion piece:

“Beyond pointing out that immigration and integration are important issues that some people worry about, most politicians have remarkably little to say about them. A long-time TD once told me this was because they were reluctant to “ride the tiger” or to risk being misinterpreted, but there is also a sense that politicians have not yet mustered the confidence to talk about these questions in any meaningful way.”

This caution is reflected in the banality of the discourse about immigrants, especially from official sources. The effort seems to be to say vaguely positive things about immigration or rather the need for integration, while also suggesting that Ireland should not be a victim of the social tensions that are said to exist between immigrant and ‘local’ communities in Britain and France, for example.

In a statement issued at the launch of ‘Migration Nation’ a ‘Statement on Integration Strategy and Diversity Management’ in May, Minister of State for Integration Conor Lenihan announced:

“By putting the proper structures in place and by strategic planning for the future, we can avoid the difficulties that other countries have experienced.”

One of the initiatives taken by government to help towards integration was the setting up of the National Action Plan against Racism (NAPR). In the Welcome page on their site the chairperson of the NAPR steering committee, Lucy Gaffney says:

“I believe that the key to real progress lies with everyone doing their bit: “new” and “old” Irish, public, private and voluntary sector. Discrimination, racism, the intolerance of others, is borne out of ignorance. Be it in our workplaces, our schools our homes, a willingness to learn about others and to communicate with others is the key to a successful, fair and open society.”

This seems to be open and inclusive, but is as much as you’d expect a government organization to say in order to be seen to be saying something. Writing an op-ed piece in the Irish Times recently, Lucy Gaffney developed the theme, but again, while emphasizing the positive aspects of immigration chose to highlight the official concerns about ‘multiculturalism’:

“In this regard for those of us involved in the immigration, multiculturalism and integration sector the initial challenge of accommodating new arrivals to the country has evolved into ensuring that the diversity we have achieved is maintained and developed for the long term benefit of Ireland’s economy and society.

Moreover, it is also about ensuring that we avoid the situation that has emerged in many other European countries in recent years, whereby the frustrations of the local population in less prosperous times are vented against immigrant communities”.

Once again the term is integration, which seems in the official language suggested by Ruairi Quinn to be the one way street of those who come to our country accepting our ways without us accepting theirs. However, what is significant here is the phrase: “whereby the frustrations of the local population in less prosperous times are vented against immigrant communities”.

This seems to acknowledge an unspoken truth that any conflict between the local population and new immigrants would be based around the competition for fewer jobs, and while that local population is not identified it is implied that they would be living in areas where unemployment would rise during an economic slump. This assumption is based on the reference to ‘other European countries’, where tensions have arisen usually in areas that are, in the case of Britain, traditionally working class, and in the case of France, poorly serviced suburbs with very high unemployment. None of this is stated explicitly because to do so would require Gaffney to discuss class, power and the economic conditions surrounding the social tensions that are often attributed to racial or ethnic difference. That is, she avoids providing a social, political and economic context.

However, once the association is made she moves on to discussing the recent Lisbon vote:

“For that reason the Lisbon Treaty rejection is of concern. As yet, the impact of immigration as a factor in the No vote has yet to be quantified. With some polls saying it was a minimal factor, and other surveys saying it contributed to up to 10% of the No vote, the precise influence is not known. However, anecdotal feedback suggests the issue was a factor in influencing the outcome.”

What a strange statement this is: that while there is no evidence available to say that fears about immigration did influence the decisions of the electorate to vote no the hearsay provided by politicians with a specific constituency agenda, and who are clearly confused about the outcome of the vote, is enough to highlight it as a concern.

This is perhaps because Lucy Gaffney and the politicians in question have something in common. The politicians have already used immigration and multiculturalism to show their constituents that they will fight to protect their culture and national identity. Lucy Gaffney, as well as being chairperson of NPAR is also chairperson of Communicorp, Denis O’Brien’s media group, a company renowned for it’s pursuit of profit. No crime there, perhaps, but with her role in NPAR she is able to garner some good PR by supporting a positive cause, anti-racism, without needing to say anything of great significance on the matter. Indeed her entire article is filled with vague and meaningless waffle.

However, what is highly significant about it is that the chairperson of a task force set up to deal with racism should associate the Lisbon No vote with fears among Irish workers about increasing immigration. This is because by doing so she has implied that those who voted no are racist.

Chris Andrews and others have stated that concerns about immigration among the Irish electorate does not indicate that the Irish are racist, but because they have to directly state it means that it could be implied. Gaffney, however, does not even try to disassociate the two. Instead she sums up:

“If we are to achieve a more integrated society and to avoid the conflicts and tensions that have existed between people from different ethnic backgrounds in other European countries, then we must ensure that anti-racism policies are not put on the back burner.”

So the influence of fears around immigration on the No vote means that anti-racism policies are needed. This is not to argue that racism should not be combated, or that fears about immigration in general are not widespread, or indeed that these fears are increasing because of economic uncertainty. What it does do however, is to cast those who voted no in a particularly negative light.

And Lucy Gaffney is not the only one.

Veteran Irish Times analyst and EU expert Paul Gillespie had this to say in a recent Irish Times column:

“It is difficult to explain that such considerations probably played a minimal role in the voting, at least explicitly. Research shows attitudes to EU enlargement did not loom that large in the No vote, although Irish opinion is only moderately in favour of it. Economic uncertainty and worries about unemployment in the face of large-scale immigration from central and eastern Europe were factors in the large working-class vote against the treaty, but there is little evidence of a racist effect. While the Government’s eye was off the developing economic crisis during the campaign, it is not surprising that its portents should have affected ordinary voters, many of whom have rational fears about exposure to globalisation and insufficient reason to believe the EU will protect them. That is obviously one assurance required in any revisiting of the issue.”

Of the considerable number of factors that were said to influence the no vote it is very surprising that Gillespie would emphasis this one, while also acknowledging that attitudes towards enlargement did not feature in the No vote. Where Gillespie differs from Gaffney is that he specifically mentions a ‘large working class’ vote. He then goes on to associate concerns about the economy with the No vote despite the fact that the economy had nothing do with the Lisbon Treaty itself.

Like Gaffney, Gillespie doesn’t indicate what research he is referring to. Perhaps he presumes this is widely known. The only two surveys completed on the outcome of the Lisbon vote were the Eurobarometer poll, which was conducted immediately after the poll on the 13th of June and the Red C poll published in the Sunday Business Post and conducted between the June 16th and June 18th. In the Eurobarometer poll fears about immigration only featured with 1% of No voters. In the Red C poll however, this figure was considerably higher, at 65%.

How is it possible that two polls conducted so closely together could be so dramatically different?

One reason is that both polls were put together in a very different way. The Eurobarometer poll asked people directly what had influence their decision to vote. The Red C poll on the other hand asked voters how they had voted and then asked them their opinion on a wide variety of issues. The analysts then examined these opinions in the light of whether they voted yes or no.

Another significant difference is that the Eurobarometer poll didn’t ask about the economy or unemployment, while the Red C poll did.

However, what we can see is that the results from these polls are being used to paint the No voter in a particular light. In the case of Gaffney the allusion to economic forces is vague, and the association of the No voter with an anti-immigration prejudice alludes to potential racism. In the case of Gillespie, concerns about the economy are attributed to a ‘large working-class vote’ who have based their decision on their concerns that immigrants will take their jobs. Gillespie refers to some survey findings but is not specific so it is difficult to counter it.

One commentator who has made the same points as Gillespie though is TCD economist Kevin O’Rourke, in an article republished on Irish Left Review last week. Fortunately, he refers directly to the findings of both polls to make his points that a large working class no vote was based on fears that in uncertain economic times an increasing number of immigrants might potentially take their jobs.

He starts off by suggesting that both polls indicate that the vote broke down along class lines. However, in order to support this he refers to the Eurobaromter poll, which found that:

“60% of the self-employed, 66% of senior managers, 58% of professionals and 57% of those who left the educational system after the age of 20 voted in favour of the Treaty. By contrast, 58% of the unemployed and 74% of manual workers voted against it.”

This, as evidence of class difference is extremely distorted, even within a short article and being necessarily limited by the findings of the poll. This, we are led to believe, is the working class to which Gillespie is referring, yet it is only made up of the unemployed and manual workers, which when contrasted with those who left the educational system after the age of 20 suggest that it consists of nothing but ignorant uneducated thicks and spongers. As Michael Zweig argues, definitions of working class should be significantly broader:

“[Working class people] are skilled and unskilled, in manufacturing and in services, men and women of all races, nationalities, religions. They drive trucks, write routine computer code, operate machinery, wait tables, sort and deliver the mail, work on assembly lines, stand all day as bank tellers, perform thousands of jobs in every sector of the economy. For all their differences, working class people share a common place in production, where they have relatively little control over the pace or content of their work, and aren’t anybody’s boss.”

There is a very clear reason why the definition of working class provided by O’Rourke and the other commentators is so limited and so negative. Clearly, he is not interested in the real working class - an entity he has not given much thought to and who make up much more of the Irish electorate than O’Rourke’s easy analysis would allow - because he wishes to use the term to paint all No voters as being made up of this negative version of what he calls ‘working class’. By making the association the hope is, whether consciously or not, to shame all No voters who would normally not want to associate themselves with this group.

But this evidence of the working class vote only comes from the Eurobarometer poll. Looking at the Red C poll he only says: “The picture which emerges from the Red C poll is very similar” before moving on to use the anecdotes provided by politicians for the article in the Sunday Business Post. As I have already suggested these figures should not be considered to be reliable sources. After all, Fine Gael are not renowned for their class analysis:

“Fine Gael’s own study of the ballot boxes in Varadkar’s Dublin West constituency revealed voting patterns along class lines, with wealthier areas such as Castleknock returning a 71 per cent Yes vote, compared to an 83.4 per cent No vote in less affluent areas such as Blakestown in Mulhuddart.”

This is the only real basis of how the Lisbon broke along class lines and its from FG media hotty Leo Varadkar. O’Rourke mentions however, that where the polls differ is on the reasons why they voted no. Focusing in on the immigration factor, he now looks at the findings of the Red C poll:

“65% of those against the Treaty agreed with the statement that “There should be much stricter limits on the number of foreigners coming into Ireland”, as opposed to a still depressingly high 52% of those in favour of it. 58% of those opposed to the treaty, but just 14% of those in favour of it, agreed that if the treaty had been passed, it would have caused even more unemployment. 55% of those against the treaty, as opposed to 41% of those in favour of it, reported that their household’s financial situation had deteriorated in the past 12 months.”

Having already attributed a No vote to a particularly negative image of the working class he now chooses to ignore something that should stop him in his tracks. 65% of No voters agreed with the statement “There should be much stricter limits on the number of foreigners coming into Ireland” yet so did 52%. O’Rourke calls this depressingly high, but doesn’t recognize that this shows that the vast majority of the electorate agreed with the statement, yet in the case of a significant proportion of them they still voted yes. If this factor is taken on its own the majority of No voters AND the majority of yes votes thought that the number of foreigners coming into Ireland should be restricted. Yet did this concern have an influence on how they voted?

Hugh Green suggests that this finding means nothing unless we know how relatively important it is as a factor when compared to other factors that may have influenced voters to vote No.

“So about two thirds of No voters agreed with stricter limits, which means that half of those who voted Yes also agreed with stricter limits. That is also a high percentage of Yes voters.

But is the poll result evidence in itself that immigration was a decisive, or even significant factor in the No vote? To arrive at that conclusion, would one not have to demonstrate that immigration was also a significant factor in the Yes vote?

What this poll does not provide is an indication of the relative importance of immigration to other issues in terms of how voters made their choice. Therefore it says next to nothing about why people voted No. I mean, you could ask voters whether they think paedophiles should be castrated, and it may turn out that a higher percentage of No voters favour castration for paedophiles, but you couldn’t say, based on that, that people voted No to Lisbon because the EU does not castrate paedophiles, or, in the Sunday Business Post’s terms, ‘A fear of paedophiles not getting castrated was an unspoken issue behind the Lisbon No vote’.”

However, what is also happening in the analysis around the Red C poll is an attempt to connect the immigration issue with concerns about unemployment and the economy, which affects some members of the electorate more than others. That is, attributing the negative value of anti-immigrant prejudice, the sort that is responsible for inter-ethnic tension in other countries where multiculturalism can be found, with the no voter while at the same time ignoring the same prejudice in the yes voter. This is done by suggesting that the No vote mainly occurred in the ‘working class’ and explaining away anti-immigration prejudice as a ‘working-class’ trait common amongst the less well-educated (or ignorant) and the low skilled.

So, to simplify it hugely, the yes vote was middle class and well educated while the No vote was ‘working-class’, low skilled, less well-educated, ignorant and considering its underlying anti-immigration prejudice due to their economic vulnerability, potentially racist. So voting yes is to associate yourself with all those who are successful within Irish society, and to vote no is align yourself with the less desirable.

But there is more to this. The emphasis on immigration is also being used to disguise a deeper problem. Kevin O’Rourke remarks that the No vote points to a class divide in relation not only to the Irish vote but with a similar French vote as well. But as we have seen his analysis of class is extremely distorted. The counterpoint of working class with immigrants is also interesting in the light of the quote from Badiou which I provide at the beginning of this article. Badiou is talking about how the term ‘immigrant’ is used in political debates in France about workers rights. Here is the quote in full:

“..over the last twenty years, there has been a systematic campaign to eliminate any figure of the worker from political space. ‘Immigrant’ is a word that came to be used at a certain moment in this campaign. For example, one of the Mitterrand governments, the Mauroy government, during major workers’ strikes at Flins, at Citroen, at Talbot, said that these workers were in fact immigrants, who were not really integrated into French social reality. The category ‘immigrant’ has been systematically substituted for the category ‘worker’, only to be supplanted in its turn by the category of the ‘clandestine’ or illegal alien. First workers, then immigrants, finally illegal aliens. If we insist that we are actually talking about workers - and whether they have worked, are working, or no longer work, doesn’t represent a subjective difference - it is to struggle against this unceasing effort to erase any political reference to the figure of the worker. It is essential to ask whether, in politics, we count the figure of the worker for something, or for nothing. To count it for nothing means that we count nothing but capital. What is counted is the level of the stock market, the Euro, financial investment, competition and so on; the figure of the worker, on the other hand, counts for nothing.

The question is all the more important in that it touches on much of the meaning of the December 1995 strikes in France. People protested: ‘We don’t count, the figure of work that we represent counts for nothing.’ That’s why we maintain that a figure of the worker - which does not mean a working class, or a charismatic proletariat - must be upheld as alive and active in the field of politics. And I think that this has nothing to do with those arguments that try to link the question of immigrants to a purely economic understanding of the amount of available work.”

In O’Rourke’s analysis we see that the notion of worker doesn’t even begin to address the idea of who actually works in this country, yet it is happy to use the word ‘immigrants’, who require integration, without acknowledging that they too are workers and should be part of a wider working class. So we have a situation where workers from different cultural backgrounds are being pitted against each other to compete for a limited number of jobs and that this ‘competition’ accounts for why a proportion of people voted no.

Ruadhán Mac Cormaic also discusses how the immigration issue, which he acknowledges is dealt with only superficially, can be used as a way of disguising deeper problems.

“The French anthropologist Emmanuel Terray put the idea well when, in a discussion on France’s headscarf debate, he cited Hungarian historian István Bibó’s contention that when a community fails to find within itself the means to deal with a problem that challenges its self-image, it may be tempted to adopt a defensive ploy. “It will substitute a fictional problem, which can be mediated purely through words and symbols, for the real one that it finds insurmountable. In grappling with the former, the community can convince itself that it has successfully confronted the latter,” he said.”

And here we have a reasonable explanation why the ‘immigration’ issue has received so much prominence. In the absence of a clear reason why the Irish people voted the way they did, politicians and commentators have reached for a ‘fiction’ to cover their confusion and in the case of the government, their serious diplomatic difficulties.

But the reason why Ireland voted no is not that hard to understand, and it doesn’t require a specially commissioned polling company employed to canvas the opinions of 2000 voters to find it out.

What all the commentators have failed to do, thus far, is put the Lisbon vote in the context of other votes for EU referenda in Ireland. They have failed to do this because to do so would undermine their agenda to try and determine the outcome of a second Lisbon vote.

If, however we look at the Irish Times/MRBI poll published on the 6^th of June we see that the number of undecided voters in the week before the vote was 28%.

“The poll shows the number of people intending to vote No has almost doubled to 35 per cent (up 17 points) since the last poll three weeks ago, while the number of the Yes side has declined to 30 per cent (down 5 points).

The number of undecided voters is still a significant 28 per cent (down 12 points) while 7 per cent won’t vote.”

What is significant here is that those intending to vote no, 35%, matches a consistent no vote for all EU referenda since the 1980s. It seems obvious that in the final week that a no vote would consolidate as it had previously, and to leave 28% as undecided, voters who could, one imagines, have gone either way. Indeed, in the past this 28% has moved towards ratification.

In the tenth referendum on the Constitution, which ratified the Single European Act, the vote was 69.9 for and 30.1 against.

In the eleventh referendum on the Constitution, or the Maastricht Treaty, the vote was 69.1 for and 30.9 against.

In the eighteenth referendum on the Constitution, or the Amsterdam Treaty, the vote was 61.7 for and 38.3 against.

Although the first Nice treaty failed to be ratified (partially because of a very low turnout), it was successful when run again, with 62.9 for and 37.1 against.

But why in the final week were these 28% not brought over to the yes side? Was it concern about the influx of immigrants in these uncertain economic times? Unfortunately the reason is more down to earth, and harder for the pundits to easily explain away.

Probably the largest factor that swung it was that the Yes campaign failed utterly in providing the undecided voter with a very good reason why they should have voted Yes to Lisbon. They provided a lot of reasons why they shouldn’t believe what the No campaigners were saying, but nothing about why it would be good for them, and for Ireland, to change the sovereignty of their constitution to ratify this particular treaty when it was stated that it was purely a procedural document.

And in this respect Irish voters are no different to those who voted on recent EU referenda in other countries, most notably in France and the Netherlands. This is because within European representative democracies referenda are treated very differently by the electorate to parliamentary elections. In his inaugural blog post for the new Irish Times political blog veteran political correspondent Deaglán de Bréadún made this observation about the referendum:

“Certainly, mid-level contacts in Fianna Fail are openly sceptical about the chances of turning things around with a second run at the polls. Indeed, observers both inside and outside the party have expressed the view that there is a new mood among the public that is dubious about politicians in general, feels alienated from the ruling elite (with “the meeja” seen as part of that) and believes it did not get a fair share of Celtic Tiger largesse.

They weren’t prepared to take it out on FF in the general election because they feared the consequences of bringing in new, untried management to run the economy. So they used Lisbon to give their rulers a risk-free rabbit-punch. A reheated Lisbon presented to the voters next spring could well get the same response.”

This was written after the Sunday Business Post Red C poll on the 22nd of June indicated that support for Fianna Fail remained unchanged after the referendum. It also repeats the assumption that voting was influenced by thoughts about the economy - it’s the working class again!

But de Bréadún at least notices something even if he’s not able to figure out what it is. When he says “they used Lisbon to give their rulers a risk-free rabbit-punch” he is unwittingly pointing towards a phenomenon that is certainly not unique to the Irish.

The political philosopher Slavoj Žižek had a piece published in the El País, about the Irish No vote that is quite revealing on this point. Once again, I’m grateful to Hugh Green as he translated a section of the article on his blog.

In it Žižek says:

“The Irish voters had not been presented with a symmetrical choice, because the very terms of the referendum gave preference to a Yes. The authorities proposed to the people an option which, in practice, was nothing of the sort, since it consisted of ratifying the inevitable, which was the result of enlightened experience. The media and the political elite portrayed the referendum as a choice between knowledge and ignorance, between experience and ideology, between post-political administration and old political passions. However, the very fact that there was no alternative and coherent political vision that could serve as a basis for the No vote constitutes the greatest possible damnation for the political and media elite: proof of their inability to express, to translate into a political vision, the yearnings and dissatisfactions of the population.”

When an electorate is faced with an election they say that they vote for those politicians they feel would most adequately represent them in the circumstances. But it is also the case within representative democracy that this is usually the only interface they have with politicians. Often they are unhappy with how things are run, but faced with the candidates available they make their decision broadly because they agree in general with their policies. They do this because they are pragmatic. They know this is how the system works. However, this broadness, generality and limitation of only choosing from the available candidates means that there is an underlying dissatisfaction; a yearning for more involvement, built into the system. They also acknowledge that often the system acts against them.

Žižek continues (and apologies for quoting at length):

“In other words, this referendum had something rather peculiar: its result was simultaneously the expected one and a surprise, as though one knows what’s going to happen but, somehow, can’t believe that it’s happening. This discrepancy reflects far more dangerous division among the voters: the majority (of the minority who bothered going out to vote) went against the treaty despite the fact that all the parliamentary parties (with the exception of Sinn Fein) were decidedly in favour.

The same is happening in other countries, like in the neighbouring UK, where, just before winning the last election, Tony Blair was chosen by a large majority as the most hated man in the country. This divergence between the explicit political choice that the voter makes and his intimate dissatisfaction ought to sound the alarm bells: it means that party democracy is unable to capture the mood of the people, the fact that a vague resentment is building up which, without due democratic expression, can only flow out in dark “irrational” bursts. When referendums transmit a message that directly contradict the message of the elections, we are dealing with a divided voter, who, for example (thinks that he) knows very well that Tony Blair’s policies are the only reasonable ones but, even so.. he can’t abide him.”

So, contrary to what de Bréadún and other commentators have said, the Lisbon vote does not show a ‘new’ distrust of politicians, or a ‘new’ mood, or indeed a ‘new’ distrust of the EU or a ‘new’ anti-EU bias (this has remained steady at 30 - 37% for decades). Rather, it is that referenda provide the means for the divided voter to express their vague resentment at how they are governed and which cannot be released by normal democratic means. This is where a discord (rather than a ‘dissconnect’) exists between the Irish voter and the EU.

It has nothing to do with ‘class’ or ‘immigration’, nothing to do with the economy, as such, and absolutely nothing to do with the Irish electorate turning against the EU. In fact, it has everything to do with the inability of Irish politicians to be engaged in the European project thoroughly enough to provide the electorate with a good enough reason why they should ratify a treaty that means nothing to them. The reason had to be good enough to allow them to get over their ‘intimate dissatisfaction’, which after all is a comfort for any voter in a system that chooses to malign them and dictate how they should behave at every opportunity.

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[1] Alain Badiou, Appendix: Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou, Verso (2001)