In the wake of the rejection of the Treaty of Lisbon in June 2008, there were several suggestions that immigration had been an ‘unspoken’ issue in the referendum – an issue that went below the radar of the media in the campaign but mattered to voters. This would have been contrary to most of Ireland’s historical experience with immigration, as it has been an issue with little electoral relevance. However, the relatively recent French and Dutch referendums on the Constitutional Treaty in 2005, in which immigration was a salient issue, might have driven expectations of immigration being mobilised by the anti-Lisbon vote.

On this background, I ask how migration was linked to the issue of European integration in the context of the two Irish referendums on the Lisbon Treaty in 2008 and 2009. The paper explores both the salience of migration prior to the referendums, and how and by whom linkages of the two issues were made. The paper is based on a systematic analysis of political claims in 326 newspaper articles (The Irish Times and Irish Independent) during the two referendum campaigns. The paper is part of a larger project exploring how migration is linked to European integration in referendums, and it compares the results from Ireland to similar analysis of data from Denmark (JHA opt-out referendum in 2015) and the UK (Brexit referendum in 2016).

The 50^th Anniversary of Ireland in the European Union is a good moment to take stock of Irish involvement in the European Parliament, and how it has evolved over time, including a discussion of the role of the 3 members from Northern Ireland who sat in the EP between 1979 and the final date of Brexit in January 2020.

In 1973 Irish engagement with other European countries was much more limited than at present and most Irish parties had no obvious political allies in the old nominated European Parliament. This has now greatly changed.

The current paper looks at different aspects of Irish involvement in the European Parliament. It reviews the outcome of the various EP elections and the policy and other issues that were raised in them as compared to in other EU countries. It then goes on to look at the individual Irish(including Northern Irish) members, their backgrounds, their interests and policy concerns, their political families, their committees as well as their leadership positions within the European Parliament.

The paper has a specific section examining the distinctive role of the EP as a forum for debate on a possible European contribution to improving the political situation in Northern Ireland, notably through the recommendations of the Haagerup report and through EU regional and social funding.

The final section of the paper looks at how Irish attitudes have changed over time with regards to Irish participation in the European Parliament and how Irish MEPs have become increasingly embedded within wider European political networks.

Unlike in a number of other European countries, Eurosceptic views have, so far at least, always been in a minority in Ireland and there may have been indifference but rarely hostility to the European Parliament. Defence of Irish positions in Europe, however, was initially perceived to be easier in the Council and European than in the European Parliament where it currently only has 13 MEPs out of 705.

This attitude has gradually changed as the European Parliament has increasingly been seen as a complement to the other EU institutions and as a potentially valuable additional forum for the defence of Irish interests. This became particularly evident in the aftermath of Brexit in the context of European Parliament solidarity with specific Irish concerns on the Northern Irish border and on the need to protect both the EU Single Market and the achievements of the Good Friday Agreement.

This paper addresses the question of how referendum results have politicised the issue of European integration in Ireland.

Research on how parties respond to the result of referendums have produced conflicting results as to whether referendums increase or decrease politicisation of the issue being voted upon (De Vries 2009; McGraw 2018).

This case study builds upon findings from a comparative European study that the margin of victory in referendums has a significant impact upon levels of politicisation, in terms of changes in salience and polarisation between parties.

The comparative findings suggest that referendums with a large margin of victory reduce levels of politicisation with more divisive outcomes having the opposite effect. Levels of politicisation are conditioned by whether the political actors responding to the outcomes are classified as mainstream or challenger parties. The degree to which individual parties seek to politicise or depoliticise Integration in terms of the salience attributed to it and changes in their position on the issue are also affected by whether they supported the winning outcome, their position within national political systems, levels of internal cohesion and relationship with rivals.

Changes to levels of politicisation of the European integration following the 2008 and 2009 Nice treaty referendums in Ireland mark it as an outlier within the comparative results. The focus of this paper is on identifying the extent to which country specific opportunity structures and individual party characteristics influenced post referendum politicisation of European integration within Ireland.