South Africa's far-right political leader, Mr Eugene Terreblanche, has strongly applauded Irish voters for supporting last month's referendum to restrict citizenship rights.
The leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement was one of several far-right international figures whose views on the referendum were sought by the Dubliner magazine.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has acknowledged that no other EU member-state had ever made representations to the Government about immigration laws, despite the ruling in the Chen case. In a written parliamentary answer last Thursday to Green Party TD, Mr Dan Boyle, he said: "No formal representations have been made to me by my EU ministerial counterparts concerning our citizenship laws."
In his Dubliner interview, Mr Terreblanche said: "I congratulate the Minister on trying to protect the people against immigrants who they don't want to be in Ireland. What I really appreciate about the Irish is that they are a very proud people. They are really trying to protect the Irish people from the overflowing and the overcrowding of other people.
"They see Ireland as their sole and sovereign country. For our people in South Africa you are really an inspiration, because we don't want to be changed by the 'new nation' idea in South Africa either - to go up into a majority which will definitely mean the end of the small Afrikaner Boer people," he said.
In an interview last night with The Irish Times, Mr Terreblanche acknowledged he was not "well informed" about the details of the referendum, passed by a 4:1 majority. "I only came out of prison three weeks ago. It wasn't possible for me to have my hand on the pulse of things at that stage," he said in a telephone interview from his home.
He was released on parole on June 11th after serving three years of a five-year term for the attempted murder of a black security guard in 1996. He said he was contacted by the Dubliner and told that the Irish people had accepted changes that made it more difficult for "foreigners to come to your country".
"Everybody is entitled to defend their own country and its culture and all those things that their forebears fought for and that could be changed by strange people who could change your culture and history." He said he had been "inspired" by the "example of the Irish who fought for 600, 700 years against the British" like Afrikaners had done against "black forces and the British".
The magazine also interviewed Mr David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who once ran for the governorship of Louisiana. He said: "The passing of this referendum is an amazing step for Ireland and the Irish people. Thank you, Minister McDowell, for defending the heritage of our mothers and fathers. The European world is being overwhelmed [by immigrants\]."
