Today the people vote on who they’d like to see running the country and since 2020, it would be fair to say that all has changed, changed utterly. Does that mean on Saturday that a “terrible beauty” will be born. Time will tell, though change is never wrought by those who sit at home or don’t bother voting.
Elections have a habit of focusing the mind, and a very significant majority of voters repeatedly telling pollsters that they disapproved of the government’s chaotic immigration policy has led the two bigger members of the Coalition parties to come out with some tough talk in the latter part of this year about actions they might in that regard take if re-elected.
However, one thing the short and uninspiring election campaign did achieve was to force the usually evasive members of government to answer some straight answers on immigration.
Minister Helen McEntee let the cat out of the bag when – away from the scripted tik-toks and the cringy social media chats – she outlined exactly what another five years with her party co-steering the country’s immigration policy would look like.
“Millions” of people would be on the move and we couldn’t tell them “not to seek a better life”, she said on Virgin Media. As John McGuirk has pointed out, and as most other EU countries are now realising, her duty should firstly be to the Irish people, not to those arriving to this already over-stretched country in unsustainable numbers.
When asked on RTÉ’s Upfront – by a young man who had come here to study – why the government was allowing people to come to this country when finding somewhere to live was impossible, she then revealed that the government’s plan was to bring more people here to build houses for the people who were coming here, the kind of nonsensical circular thinking and policy-making that is causing so much fury amongst voters.
She also insisted – as did Fianna Fáil – that we needed immigration for our healthcare system even though, as we have noted many times on this platform, the shortage of housing is driving our young medical professionals away in their droves. Curious, isn’t it, that none of the government parties ever seek to bring our own people home – instead FF and FG along with the Greens, the Soc Dems, Labour and the looney left want to keep flinging our borders open and generally behaving like a drunken captain on a sinking ship.
In fairness to the Greens, they’re openly doubling down on the madness, adopting a no-holds barred approach to cramming people in, saying that, in addition to more and more IPAS spaces, they want to extend immediate family reunification rights for those in full time employment, because the current family reunification process is “discriminatory.”
15, 000 to 20,000 asylum seekers every year would be the new normal, Roderic O’Gorman previously said, and none of his fellow Cabinet members spoke up to say that would be a very very bad idea – given the tents on the canal, the children going missing in the system, the hundreds of millions being lost to tourism, and the palpable anger in town and villages – to not just increase but explode the number of people being offered asylum accommodation.
We currently have almost 3,000 people claiming asylum in tents because IPAS can’t house the 32,587 people who have arrived, with many waiting years to be processed, a factor exacerbated by the taxpayer-funded NGOs who are helping failed applicants appeal. The system is falling apart because the numbers – quite apart from the 100,000 Ukrainians who arrived – rocketed from 3 or 4 thousand a year to 13,000 in 2023, and up to 19,000 expected in 2024.
What on earth will happen if we have five more years of up to 20,000 migrants claiming asylum? Will we have up to 100,000 people in IPAS accommodation? It would be utter madness, causing real suffering to both Irish people and those arriving – who are, the figures show, mostly economic migrants.
It’s worth recapping on the key factors that have led to this whole immigration mess:
Given all of this, its very obvious that we need radical change in how we are dealing with migration in this country. Most of the political parties are seriously out of kilter with the views of a very significant majority of people on this issue. 66% of people told Red C polling this year that Ireland had take in “too many refugees” – while, in July, 72% told pollsters that there should be “very strict limits on the number of immigrants coming to live in Ireland”.
Yet that view is almost completely unrepresented in the main political parties. Only Independents or smaller parties are arguing this as a matter of policy.
It’s worth noting that the billions in Corporation Tax from multinationals which is currently allowing the political parties to spend freely on asylum – and feel good about being the best boys in Europe, while bleating on about “international obligations” – will run out sooner rather than later. But we’ll be left with an unprecedented number of people who have come here to live and, as the experience of other European countries has shown, may have no real desire to integrate.
So who will bring about that change? Not Sinn Féin whose vote, in the opinion polls at least, has been severely battered by its support for measures which caused the mess – and who seem to share Fianna Fáil’s antipathy to “backward-looking sovereignty”. They simply blather about where to put asylum centres instead of saying that what we actually need is a pause in asylum.
That’s a key point: all the talk is about where to accommodate numbers of migrants, and speeding up processing times, but the big parties have utterly failed to see that what we actually need is to pause asylum, to have a real public debate on immigration, and to try to bring our own people home instead of insisting that Ireland must continue to have unprecedented levels of immigration.
Another 5 years of the same political thinking that has led to this absolute mess on immigration would be an unmitigated disaster. In that regard, today is a key electoral moment for this country.