The failure of Mulhud-dart’s immigrant candidates to win a single seat leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
The election was always going to be interesting in an area where three immigrant candidates openly slugged it out, and there was certainly an expectation that at least one of them would get elected.
But as it turned out, all three candidates – each of whom was Nigerian – performed poorly at the polls and lost out on the first count. In African political parlance, it would have been said that they got thrashed and lost their deposits.
The results were similar for other immigrant candidates across the country, but Mulhuddart was presumed to be a special case. In an area with a significant immigrant population, these candidates surely believed they had a shot at at least one of the five seats available. However, was the constituency ready for that to happen? Or was their defeat inevitable?
What we know for sure is that in an area with a total electorate of 30,735, only 13,427 – fewer than half – turned out to vote.
From early on, there were great hopes for an immigrant victory in Mulhuddart. A friend of mine felt that Barack Obama’s historic election victory in the US would be the catalyst to usher in a time of change throughout the country, and in this constituency in particular.
No doubt such sentiments featured in the minds of the three candidates – Fine Gael’s Adeola Ogunsina, Fianna Fáil’s Idowu Olafimihan and independent Ignatius Okafor – but when the count came in, it was clear that change would not come as easily as they might have hoped.
Despite their determined work campaigning and canvassing among their fellow residents, all three were eliminated from the running barely out of the gate: Ogunsina with 965 votes, Olafimihan with 611 votes and Okafor with just 464. So what happened? How did it all go so wrong?
In my view, the campaign has surely cost these candidates more than just time and money. The parties that chose Ogunsina and Olafimihan respectively were creative and crafty in putting forward immigrant representatives in the area, but was there more to this than meets the eye? Could there have been a strategy to split the immigrant vote? Possibly, but with such a poor turnout of voters, this would be too simplistic.
A much more likely reason would lie in the difficulties some immigrants in the area experienced in registering for the local elections. Did the candidates work hard enough to inform people about the voter registration process? Did they see it as a common interest?
Meanwhile, Ogunsina did not do himself any favours by siding with a party with a controversial stance towards Ireland’s immigrant communities. And this wasn’t helped by a poor showing on Newstalk radio, where he declared that he did not come into the country on the basis of seeking asylum.
While he did not campaign on the basis of his ethnic background, it was still bad political judgement to speak the way he did. It would have been better to have added some positive words for immigration and the asylum process, rather than distancing himself from the ‘A’ word.
For Olafimihan, it was courageous to have sought election on the platform of the Government party after the bashing they’ve been receiving from all angles. But he must be acutely aware that some of the votes he received were at the cost of his opponents. Similarly, for Okafor, catching up was never going to be easy, and he could have stepped down as a hero to fight another day.
As it was, the bitter truth is that some form of Nigerian politics came into play, and all three ended up losers.
After the dust has settled, it seems Mulhuddart’s time to make history is still far away. When and if it comes again, I wonder, will history repeat itself?
