An American import Ireland doesn't want

In the USA, Bob Shrum is a well-known political consultant for Democratic candidates. In the Republic of Ireland, his name is only well known to those who follow national politics relatively closely, because his firm, Shrum, Devine and Donilon, has provided similar services to the Republic's semi-permanent party of government, Fianna Fail. If the American consultants were implementing the kind of "know your customer" rule that US banks are required to follow, it's not clear that this pairing would pass muster. For one thing, there's rarely a day that goes by that doesn't bring some new revelation of past Fianna Fail corruption. But now there's a new angle on just what exact type of services are being provided by Shrum et al.

Labour party leader Pat Rabbitte alleged (link may require subs.) in the Dail (Irish lower house) yesterday that Shrum's firm had done private polling for Fianna Fail which revealed that concerns about immigration were widespread amongst the public and even trumped the similarly widespread concern about the state of the Republic's healthcare system. This polling in turn, Rabbitte suggested, was the basis for the government's sudden proposal for a constitutional referendum in June that would remove the automatic right of citizenship upon birth in Ireland.

This is designed to tackle the problem, much hyped by tabloid style journalism, of "citizenship tourism" in which furrin women are flying into the Republic 9 months pregnant, giving birth to an Irish citizen, and then leaving with babe-in-arms but setting the stage for an arriving citizen-sponger sometime down the road (we're adopting the tabloid tone here).

Following the well-established Rice-Davies principle, Fianna Fail have of course denied this, but there is strong circumstantial evidence to support Rabbitte's contention. First and foremost, the proposed referendum seemed to come from nowhere. It will be an additional ballot with the already planned local and European elections, in which the government is expected to do badly. The new proposal was only aired a couple of weeks ago, and would complicate an already fraught election process in which electronic voting will be in national use for the first time. The government tried to justify the sudden appearance of the proposal by saying that the maternity hospitals had asked for it. But:

Mr McDowell [Minister for Justice] has said the [maternity hospital] masters "pleaded" with him for Government action to do something about the large numbers of foreign nationals presenting late in their pregnancies to give birth in Ireland.

The masters subsequently denied that they had sought any constitutional or legislative change.

So it looks instead that the government, advised by Shrum's firm, thought it incredibly useful to plant a hot-button immigrant issue on the ballot and force the Opposition parties into an awkward position of either dilution by following the government line or taking the side of those damn furriners.

Bob Shrum doubtless likes to see himself on the "liberal/populist" side of issues in his US consulting. But here's a case where it looks like his populism is manifesting itself, literally, as nativism.