DUBLIN — Ireland’s former Prime Minister Bertie Ahern has landed his party in electoral hot water by making unguarded anti-immigrant comments on the campaign trail.
Ahern, who was Taoiseach from 1997 to 2008, made the remarks in a surreptitiously recorded video as he canvassed door to door for the centrist Fianna Fáil party’s candidate in an upcoming Dublin parliamentary by-election. The video clip, promoted online by anti-immigration agitators, spread like wildfire Wednesday on social media.
The footage shows Ahern, 74, talking to a potential voter, who blames him for “hordes of foreigners coming into our country” — and records his response using a phone concealed from his view.
“I think there’s too many coming in. I think we have to take some in,” Ahern tells the unidentified woman.
“I have no problem with the Ukrainians because, in fairness, Russia moved in and [there is] war in their country … but the ones I worry about are the Africans,” Ahern is recorded saying. “I agree with you on the Africans. We can’t be taking in people from the Congo and all these places. I think there’s too many from those places.”
When the woman expresses fears about Muslims, Ahern responds: “I don’t worry about this generation of Muslims. The next generation of the kids growing up, that’s when I think the problem will be.”
Ahern on Wednesday confirmed to reporters he’d made the comments — but sought to distance himself from them, arguing he’d been trying to parry the woman’s racist diatribe, not amplify it.
“I was trying to calm it all down,” he told the Irish Independent.
“I’ve no problem with people from the Congo or Africa,” he told the Irish Times.
Current Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, Ireland’s current Taoiseach, told lawmakers that Ahern’s critical comments on Africans and Muslims did not reflect the policies of his own center-right coalition government or of today’s Fianna Fáil.
“I want to be very clear, from my perspective and the party’s perspective, we do not approve of those specific comments,” Martin said in response to opposition attacks.
Rising immigration has become a recurring flashpoint issue in Ireland since 2023, when an Algerian migrant stabbed three young children, one critically, along with an adult carer outside their central Dublin school. That attack triggered rioting and fanned a wave of arson attacks and protests nationwide against housing for people seeking asylum.
Arguments over immigration are again a feature of the May 22 by-election for a vacant parliamentary seat in largely working-class Dublin Central, the most ethnically diverse constituency in Ireland. Several candidates in the 14-strong field represent left-wing opposition parties that defend the rights of immigrants.
Fianna Fáil’s candidate, John Stephens, wasn’t expected to win the Dublin Central seat even before the sudden spotlight on Ahern, who once dominated the politics of the area but has been a party outcast since resigning amid a corruption scandal in 2008.
Ahern admitted Wednesday that his love of door-to-door canvassing, honed to maximum effect in the early days of the internet, has become politically perilous in a smartphone-armed society.
“It’s a different world, this social media thing,” he said. “You talk to people at doors and you don’t expect people to be taping you.”
Irish ex-PM caught making anti-African and anti-Muslim comments on election trail
Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay
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