Europhobe gives birth to first group against immigrants

France has Jean-Marie Le Pen and Australia Pauline Hanson, but the would-be leader of an Irish crusade against immigration is a tiny figure in bottle-bottom glasses who speaks with the wounded tones of an offended school-mistress.

Aine Ni Chonaill is a one-time Progressive Democrat who now describes herself as a libertarian and Europhobe. She entered public life as a critic of "crusties" and New Age travellers in west Cork and is now campaigning against all forms of immigration.

Although the initial meeting of her newly-formed Immigration Control Platform in Ennis on Tuesday was a chaotic affair, with protests from two separate groups, it did mark the birth of Ireland's first avowedly anti-immigration organisation.

Ni Chonaill is an unlikely figure with whom to draw parallels with Le Pen. She has a bookish, prim appearance one wouldn't normally associate with the hurlyburly of political debate. She regularly quotes Conor Cruise O'Brien and Prof Joe Lee as well as a variety of Irish poets.

Once the trouble started at Tuesday's meeting, she was quickly lost behind the wall of antifascist protesters who blocked off the stage. The men in bomber jackets and Doc Marten boots were calling her a fascist, but Ni Chonaill looked more like a teacher trying to control an unruly class.

Her speaking style is meandering and punctuated by frequent and sometimes eccentric digressions. On Tuesday, for example, she cited the scenes of unemployment depicted in the film The Full Monty as evidence of why people from industrial cities such as Sheffield would want to "invade" west Cork.

A self-proclaimed Europhobe, she says she hates the EU with every tissue of her body: "Every day I dream that Hannelore Kohl will give the bastard [Helmut Kohl] an extra lump of suet to kill him."

Ni Chonaill's first complaints about "blow-ins" from other EU states arriving in west Cork were made in 1994 in a series of letters to The Irish Times. Her contention is that the immigrants are destroying the traditional fabric of rural Ireland.

SINCE then she has widened her focus to target asylum-seekers and refugees. Everyone but "named targets" should be kept out and most of the asylum-seekers already here should be deported.

She keeps a clippings file of racist incidents in other EU states and cites these as proof that multiculturalism doesn't work.

In spite of her numerous media appearances, however, her anti-immigrant platform has attracted little support. She stood as an independent in Cork South West in last year's general election but polled only 293 votes.

Originally from Cork city, she moved to west Cork in 1969. Now aged 52, she teaches Irish and history at Clonakilty Sacred Heart Secondary School. She was a founder-member of the Progressive Democrats in Clonakilty in 1985, but says she left the party shortly after.

She describes her politics as libertarian. "I'm the kind of person who doesn't believe in interfering with people's liberties. I won't wear a seat belt and I won't pay the fines for not wearing one. It's not the law's business to stop me going through the windscreen."

Remarkably, for 11 years she was a member of Amnesty International, one of the many organisations which protested at her meeting. She left in 1996 so she could campaign against the UN Convention on Refugees, which Amnesty promotes.

In Ennis, she was accompanied on stage by Mary Hederman, a housewife from Donnybrook, Dublin, who had only seen Ni Chonaill on television before last Tuesday, and a Clare woman, Fiona Hoey, who first became interested in the refugee issue through Macra na Feirme.

In typical Irish fashion, a split is already looming within the organisation. Led by Hederman, the 20 or so supporters who eventually escaped the protests and at tended the group's first meeting decided to jettison Ni Chonaill's obsession with immigration from within the EU. In place of its initial aim of "controlling" immigration from Britain, Germany and other EU states, the platform now merely wants the Government to "monitor" the New Age traveller "phenomenon".

Its main objective is to lobby the Government for a "tight" immigration policy, but since most asylum-seekers are dark-skinned, this amounts to a keep-the-blacks-out policy. The application form for joining the platform states, however, that no one who holds views of racial superiority is welcome in the organisation.

It would be easy to dismiss Ni Chonaill's organisation as a joke. Barely 20 people attended this week's meeting, one-quarter of the number of demonstrators who were present. The word from politicians and community activists, particularly in inner-city Dublin, is that many people are making the same noises about immigration as Aine Ni Chonaill. The Immigration Control Platform may be the first organisation seeking to capitalise on Irish xenophobia, but it is unlikely to be the last.