Outright hostility to the Bush administration is evident from the findings in the latest Sunday Tribune/Millward Brown IMS opinion poll. It shows that only 6% of respondents think that policies and actions pursued by the White House have made the world a safer place.

The Irish public also has an overwhelmingly negative view of the current US president, according to the poll results. Just over 70% of respondents said that Bush was doing a poor job as a world leader. Twenty percent said he was doing an average job, while 5% felt he was doing a good job.

The poll findings show that Irish people are firmly in the group of European countries, including France and Italy, where there has been massive opposition to Bush's foreign and environmental policies.

The IMS Millward Brown survey of public opinion was taken earlier this month in the aftermath of the conflict in the Middle East where the Bush administration was widely seen as having endorsed the actions of the Israeli government in Lebanon.

The findings in today's opinion poll indicate that people here have discounted the strong economic relationship between Ireland and the US when assessing the record of the Bush presidency in world affairs.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern last week stressed these economic links.

The US is the top market for Irish exports, while 600 US companies that are based in Ireland directly employ over 100,000 people. Last year they paid almost 2.5bn in corporation tax.

Labour's foreign affairs spokesman Michael D Higgins last night said strong anti-Bush findings should not be associated with anti-Americanism among Irish people.

"People are quite rightly critical of Bush but that is not to say they are anti-American. They are more sophisticated and better informed than that. They see that Bush has put confrontation over diplomacy and squandered trust. " A defence of President Bush came from Fine Gael's Dublin MEP Gay Mitchell. "Looking back on 9/11, I am not sure that any other US president would have done things differently."

Mitchell said it would be a long time before a fair assessment of Bush's record would be written and that a small country like Ireland had "no choice but to try to have good relations with the incumbent American president".

President Bush is facing another difficult time this weekend after 47 more bodies, many shot in the head, were found in Baghdad yesterday. This brings to 176 the number of bodies discovered in recent days in the Iraqi capital.