Don't vote for far-right candidates in upcoming elections, Integration Minister urges 

"I would call on people to vote for candidates who are not going to divide Irish society," Mr O'Gorman said.

He said there was only a "small number" of people in Ireland who are anti-migrant.

Attending the Bloom festival with Green Party candidate Ciaran Cuffe, who is seeking reelection to the European Parliament, Mr O'Gorman said: "I wouldn't like to see far-right candidates elected because any of the leaflets that I've gotten in, and I've gotten in plenty, have absolutely no answers.

They often have exaggerated, often crazy, statements entirely devoid of fact and these people have no answers.

The Green Party Minister said he had been recently "accosted" by one particular candidate who is "someone who I'd never seen involved in a Tidy Towns or in a community group or on their local school board".

He said "many of these people will learn" that most Irish people, particularly when they are voting in the local elections, want to elect candidates that will represent and work for their local area.

"They want someone that they know they can pick up the phone to and say 'the street light at the end of the road is on the blink, can you ask the council to get on to that?' or 'we have no playground here, could you start to work to deliver something like that?'

That's what the vast majority of people want from their local councillor, someone who's prepared to do sometimes humdrum, sometimes kind of monotonous work, but work that is so important for communities.

"These people who are trying to nationalise and even regionalise a local election, I think many of them will get a shock on election day," he said.

Mr O'Gorman, who has responsibility for asylum seekers, said when you ask the "small number " of people who are against migration how our hospital service or care service would run without people coming here to work, "they don't have any answer".

"They just seem to want a white mono-ethnic culture. I don't want that, I don't think the vast majority of Irish people want that."