The Immigration Control Platform has called for a rejection of the Nice Treaty because it would lead to a common EU asylum and immigration policy.
Launching its campaign against the treaty in the October 19th referendum, the organisation's spokeswoman, Ms Áine Ní Chonaill said the group had "no option" but to oppose the treaty because of its implications for immigration and asylum. The ICP "insists on the maintenance of national sovereignty over these areas", she said.
At a press conference in Dublin on Saturday, Ms Ní Chonaill said there was "nothing more related to sovereignty of a state than who you allow into your territory" from outside the EU. Ireland should not be told by the EU "who we will allow into our country from Africa or Asia and in what circumstances, neither will we be told what so- called burden-sharing arrangements we will have to accept".
The ICP's first concern was "control". She said "We are far from zero immigrationists or zero asylumists," but "unashamedly" would not like Ireland to "go to the level of multiracialism, multiculturalism, multi-ethnicity" which Britain and France had.
Asked what was wrong with multiculturalism, she said "experience across the EU" had shown its difficulties and tensions. "Those countries never really meant it to go quite so far."
She added that "quite frankly, demographically speaking, we were doing perfectly fine until the mid-90s and I see nothing but rising levels of angst and problems since then. Who the hell needs it? There is enough angst in life."
Asked why she opposed the efforts of EU governments to grapple with immigration, she said they "haven't got the gumption to address it in the way it has to be addressed".
She added: "Once people get their feet under your table, they are going nowhere."
An EU-style common asylum policy would be based on the full and inclusive application of the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees. This convention was an "institutional insanity and charter for invasion" and "it is time to disengage" from it.
"We are told over and over again that the EU does not want to take away powers it doesn't have to take, that it believes in subsidiarity, but there is nothing more in the brief of the sovereignty of a nation than who comes into your territory from outside the EU."
EU enlargement could reduce immigration to Ireland from accession countries, she conceded, but only "in the long-term".
"Coming into the EU would bring up the standards and less people would be trying to come in illegally . . . but it would take quite a while," Ms Ní Chonaill said. "In the meantime, as we're the only English-speaking country, there would be quite an increase" in the number of immigrants before economic benefits accrued in eastern Europe.
Ms Ní Chonaill, a single-issue general election candidate on immigration, declined to specify the level of the organisation's membership. However, she said, "we feel we represent a silent majority, certainly a very large cohort, which pretty much feels it has to be careful of its openness in the politically correct world we live in".
