‘I AM SHOCKED’... HOW THE IRISH IN BRITAIN SAW THE VOTE AND WHY IMMIGRATION WAS PIVOTAL

IRISH people living in Britain who spoke to the Irish Daily Mail were uniformly Remain voters – but they explained that their friends and co-workers cited immigration as the most influential issue in swinging a leave vote. Damien Clifford, 32, is a chartered quantity surveyor who works in construction industry and has just bought a house in Bedfordshire. He said he was now concerned about the future. ‘We are facing into a lot of uncertainty in the next few years,’ said Waterford man Mr Clifford, from his Central London office. ‘There was a lot of scaremongering going on, on both sides in the lead-up.

‘I’m in construction industry and it is now in a bit of limbo, a lot of the projects I’m working in depend on foreign investment. They could pull the plug on the projects I’m working on,’ he said. ‘We’re working for a lot of commercial clients who are setting up their European headquarters here in London.

‘We’re English speaking here in London, if they decide to up sticks and go to Germany and France they are not getting that English speaker, which is important for the US clients.

‘I think in a perverse way, Ireland could benefit, because if companies do pull the plug, they could go to the next European English-speaking city with a low corporation tax. There are plenty of able bodies workers in Dublin.’

Mr Clifford said he voted Remain but his friends and colleagues explained why they voted Leave. ‘I think immigration was a big thing and control on the borders. It was massive,’ he said. ‘A lot of people here believe the frontline services are hugely affected. Police, schools, hospitals, they’re all stretched to the limit.

‘There are hundreds of thousands coming from the EU every year. And, what happens to the public sector and frontline services if the population continues to soar? They’re not recruiting and people are not going into those professions. That was a massive issue for people I work with and speak to.’

Stephen Nolan, 32, is originally from Galway and studied law. He has just set up a small catering firm in London.

‘Everybody is a little horrified, there are Facebook messages and WhatsApp [messages] going around with people asking about Irish passports, some of it is in jest, but some of it is very serious,’ he said.

‘I have two friends who have taken the step to set up an Irish company as well as an English company today, just to position themselves so they’re a little open to another economy.

‘As a Remain voter a swing of about half a million people have changed the country’s future irrevocably. I found myself for the first time in my life sitting down at my computer looking at how the FTSE was going. I think that Mark Carney [Governor of the Bank of England] single-handedly calmed the

markets, rather than Cameron. When you see David Cameron, and his voice is cracking as he’s retiring from politics he can see that his entire legacy is being ruined. Somehow the Leave campaign managed to operate a twin campaign. There was the Tory campaign, the more acceptable campaign, then you have Farage’s campaign.

‘Maybe at home we have been asking these questions more often, we’ve a little bit more understanding of how the European project works, how the whole thing fits together.

‘But when you’re saying to people there is £350million a week we could be putting into the NHS, and its totally discredited but people are still buying into that fear-based logic you don’t have a chance. They were saying that if multi-nationals are telling you something you have to disbelieve them. How do you argue against what they were saying? Facts don’t matter any more in politics.’

Mr Nolan said he is now going to rejoin the Liberal Democrats and try and influence politics from within.

TONY McDonnell, is from Swinford, Co. Mayo. The 34-year-old works in Financial Services in the City of London and lives in an upmarket are of central London, Maida Vale. He said: ‘I am shocked. I work in the City, I’m Irish, my two groups of friends are from that really confident Remain vote. My only fear last night when the polls closed was that we wouldn’t have enough of a Leave vote to force Europe to the negotiating table and get reform. That was my fear, but this morning I was feeling quite different. I stayed up last night and it was just a car crash. It is very easy in hindsight I think that the economic arguments were way more important to people like me than they were to other people.

‘Every vote has equal weight, so for a guy like me who deals with the economy, Remain made sense. But if you are a fisherman or a plumber living up north the economic situation hasn’t really helped you and you don’t care what the experts are saying.

‘That was a big part of it. But immigration is a massive, massive issue. In Ireland we mightn’t say that it’s an EU issue. But in reality there is something like 650,000 National Insurance numbers, the same as PRSI numbers, issued to EU migrants last year. And if you’ve a population of 60million and you’re giving out that number then that’s a problem. I think that was underestimated by the establishment.

Noel Hawe, 37, lives in Streatham. He works at a TV transmission business and lives in Chiswick. He remarked: ‘Within London everybody is gutted that it did not go through. In London you have 60%-70% of the population voted for Remain, and that is very telling.

‘In my borough alone, where I voted, 75% voted to Remain. Then you get outside London, places I know, where I was curious just to see how they voted and what the split was. In Plymouth it was 60%-40% in favour of Leave. In places like that immigration would be a concern. They haven’t had a taste of the London economy, and when people don’t get a taste of it they are going to start looking at other things like immigration.’