‘How can you integrate without representation?’

IT was raining down on Dublin’s bustling Moore Street market where two Nigerian women queued at the “cheap international calls” booth.

Their bored expression as they stared into the dreary afternoon quickly changed when one of the women got a startling tap on the shoulder that had the potential to change her future in Ireland.

“Election? Ehhhh?” She raised her head and gave a questioning look to the man smiling at her enthusiastically, leaflets in hand and the South African flag pinned proudly to his suit jacket.

“Yeah, election. We are having elections for the local council. Are you registered to vote?” asked Patrick Maphoso, an independent candidate for Dublin’s north central area.

“Noooo... no, no, no,” answers the woman, shaking one finger above her head, while the other looks at Maphoso suspiciously.

He persuades them down to the International Food Market, where his team are waiting to help them fill out the forms.

“Just take it to the Garda station to get it stamped,” he says, handing them the completed form.

“Ahhhh,” one of the women clicks her fingers, knowing there must have been a catch. Garda station? Stamp? That was probably the end of that.

In next month’s local elections, non-Irish citizens living here will get to vote – whether they are students, asylum seekers or migrant workers, as long as they are legally resident in the State for six months and over 18.

In Dublin City Council, there are 337,925 people registered to vote. The electoral register figures show 14,010 of these are from other countries out of a population of more than 158,000 non-Irish/British people living in the city.

Maphoso explains that he spends more time getting people to register than he does canvassing them for votes.

“That is my main task. Most immigrants are not on the register. They don’t know that they are entitled to vote in the first place,” says the former ANC political activist during South Africa’s apartheid years.

“The main obstacle is that people have to go the Garda station. And you know yourself, there is a big gap between immigrants and the Garda and obviously there are a lot of issues that make immigrants not want to go to the Garda,” he said.

In Limerick city, a Fianna Fáil candidate from Poland is having similar problems. Anna Banko, one of about a dozen Polish candidates around the country, is persuading customers in her busy beauty salon that they must register to vote.

The 29-year-old says for many of the 70,000 or so Polish people living here, it is not so much a case that they aren’t aware they can vote, but they are just not interested in exercising the right.

“We have a bad history in Poland with voting because of communism, and because since then there have been a lot of parties fighting between them and they are not doing much for the Polish people,” she said.

“It is a very big problem for Polish people. They think: ‘Well I’m in Ireland, I don’t need to vote.’ So that’s why it’s important to show them if they do intend to stay in Ireland it would be great that they have a representation, even on Limerick City Council,” she said.

Integration Minister John Curran said funding was made available to local authorities to run campaigns informing immigrants of their right to vote.

But this is not apparent on the ground. “I feel like I am the only person doing this,” said Maphoso, exhausted from getting people to register.

Mr Curran said: “These people have come to this country and have made it their homes; they are in the workplace and active members of our society. So it is very important that they also become involved in the political system,” he said.

The minister accepted that this is not happening as much as it could. “I don’t think the change will be significant in this election,” he said.

“But it is interesting to see that a lot of immigrants have joined the mainstream political parties and quite rightly so. It will take time,” he added.

Sinn Féin does not have a single candidate out of 265 from outside of Ireland.

Fianna Fáil has nine candidates out of more than 800 running in the local elections – four Polish, one Lithuanian, two Nigerians, a Pakistani and a Russian.

Fine Gael is running seven “new Irish” candidates while the Labour Party is running three, while the Green Party has six.

“It’s about time that we turn the page really,” said Maphoso. “How do you expect people to integrate without representation? First we need representation then we can move into integration.”

Finally he meets one migrant who has registered to vote and is enthusiastic about participating in the elections.

Cyril Teo, 22, from Cameroon, said: “Considering there are so many black people on the scene, we really have to do our duty by putting people forward who are going to help us. It’s really important.

“Being someone from a different country, my voice doesn’t tend to be heard by all the politicians who are looking after theirs. Having someone coming from the same background, it would be easier for me to communicate to them my problems. It is important to me to vote, we have to do our part.”

As Maphoso walks down Moore Street, some of the locals shout out “howya Pat” clearly having welcomed the politician into the area.

But another woman tells him: “I’m sure you’re great and all, but I’m going to have to vote for one of my own.”