Funferal

Survey on attitudes to immigrants in Ireland

RTÉ is reporting a new IMS poll (for the Sunday Tribune) on attitudes towards immigrants among Irish people. The survey seems well designed – they asked about whether illegal Irish immigrants in the United States should be allowed to stay and then about immigrants in Ireland – and highlights some striking splits in public opinion. The RTÉ story talks about ‘contradictions’ but I don’t think many of those reported are more than you would expect. For instance:

There are many contradictions in Irish attitudes to multiculturalism in this survey: more than half agreed that it was good to have non-nationals living in their community, but 43% said they would reconsider buying a house if they knew a lot of foreign people were living in the area.

This doesn’t reflect a contradiction but a strong (and disappointing) split. What could be seen as a contradiction is that:

77% of respondents agreed that Irish people living illegally in the US should be allowed to legally stay there, but there is less support, 66%, for allowing non nationals waiting for decisions on their Irish residence applications to stay in Ireland.

However, 11% incompatible responses (the minimum overlap of those who support Irish emigrants to the US but not immigrants in Ireland) is not outside the norm for surveys I’ve seen. What is possibly worrying is the 30% of respondents who would not want a son or daughter to marry a foreigner, but this could be for innocuous reasons (not wanting child to leave the country) as well as resulting from what might be characterised as racist or xenophobic reasoning.
This is not to say that I think we shouldn’t be concerned about the growing xenophobia and intolerance. But the 80% support for a ‘multicultural’ society is heartening and it seems to me that we should look to build these attitudes as much as to tackle the negative ones.