The Irish are typically a generous people. That generosity was evident in the past week as the Irish Red Cross raised €1.25 million to support families in Ukraine in just two days. The Late Late Show raised €2.2 million for the same cause last Friday in a couple of hours. Other organisations collecting food and goods to send to those suffering in the war say they have been overwhelmed with the public response.
Along with that generosity is the genuine compassion Irish people feel for a people who are forced to flee a conflict not of their making, with more than 1.5 million refugees leaving the Ukraine since February 24th. The photos of devastated people thronging trains stations, clutching their children and whatever belongings they can carry, are heartbreaking.
But the statements being made by Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney, and others in answer to that crisis are, in my opinion, wholly misleading, delusional and wrong.
Effectively throwing open the doors to this tiny country, Coveney suggested that Ireland could accommodate up to 20,000 Ukrainian refugees, and said that Ireland would “not be found wanting” in helping refugees. Now Junior Minister Anne Rabbitte has increased that number by a factor of 5, saying that some 100,000 refugees are likely to arrive here soon.
European Affairs Minister Thomas Byrne chimed in by pointing out that there was “no limit” to the number of Ukrainian refugees who are entitled to come here.
He told RTÉ’s Drivetime that visa waivers had been put in place for Ukrainian citizens. “We can’t control numbers on that, if someone wants to claim asylum because they’re being oppressed or because of a war, we have to consider each and every application,” he said
“We can’t under international law put any limit on that.”
International law may be used as a basis for these claims, but there’s also an inescapable reality that Coveney, Rabbitte and the rest of the Cabinet must know makes a nonsense of their claims. “Whatever the numbers, Ireland will do its part,” Anne Rabbitte said. But is that simply offering false hope: making a promise we can’t actually keep?
The unavoidable truth is that we can’t possibly house 100,000 refugees in Ireland. At this point we can’t even house our own people. Why is everyone suddenly afraid to say that?
We live at a time when the world is wholly consumed with virtue-signalling: with posting messages which elevate the commentator by the public sharing of good intentions and admirable compassion – which almost always corresponds to whatever opinion is trending on social media.
That may sound harsh but it’s important that when senior politicians make statements which will inevitably be heard by desperate people fleeing war that they don’t make an offer which the country cannot possibly provide.
The reality is that Ireland is deep in a housing crisis which is getting worse by the day. A whole generation feels it is being locked out of the market. We’ve seem to be failing to tackle the crisis of having around 10,000 homeless people for years now, and some of those people are not just living, but dying, in tents or in the freezing cold.
Up to 120,000 people are on social housing waiting lists or in receipt of housing assistance payments – with at least a 9 years wait on average for a home.
The price of housing is soaring, with the price of an average Dublin house surging past half a million euro last year according to the CSO, as property prices nationwide shot up by more than 14%. Despite a decade of endless hand-wringing from politicians about the crisis in house costs, the only certain outcome seems to be the profiteering of vulture funds out bidding the average Irish families on new builds.
Meanwhile, those same desperate families queue to see rental properties, forking out enormous sums to have a roof over their heads.
Daft.ie’s latest report says that the number of homes available for rent across the country “has dropped to a new all-time low and led to a further spike in rents”. There were just 1,397 homes available to rent in the whole country on 1 February – the lowest amount since Daft began tracking availability in January 2006.
Average rent nationally now stands at €1,524 per month, an average of 10.3% higher than the same period in 2020, the site says. For families – who need more than a one-bedroom flat if they are raising children – the situation is even worse. Research from Eurostat has shown that Ireland had the third highest level of rent increases in the EU between 2020 and the third quarter of 2021.
Coveney’s answer to the obvious lack of housing for the limitless number of asylum seekers being proposed is that hotels might be used – or that people would open up their own homes.
But hotels are already being used to house homeless Irish families, to the detriment of their health and wellbeing most of the time, and the government has already commandeered some hotels as alternatives to the much-disparaged Direct Provision centres.
Some politicians have made vague noises about Irish families taking in refugees, which would be a heart-warming scenario if many of the same families didn’t already have their adult children, unable to fork out thousands a month in rent, still living at home – or back couch-surfing after losing their flat to another small landlord departing the market. Many of the Room for Refugees drives in the past didn’t reach anything like the required number to materialise, not because people lacked compassion but because even the kindest heart can’t manufacture living space out of nowhwere.
Niall Boylan ran a Twitter poll (not scientific but perhaps some indication of public feeling) on the issue this week.
Will you make a room available in your home for the expected 20,000 Ukrainian refugees that could come to Ireland in the coming months?
— Niall Boylan (@Niall_Boylan) March 3, 2022
Most of the votes were probably from people no less sympathetic or virtuous than Simon Coveney – just more realistic, and perhaps more honest. And they rightly think that we’re being taxed to the hilt so that the government, not the people, can manage things like housing and a refugee crisis.
It’s not just housing either. The sheer scale of what is being suggested, with no details of how it will be done, is far, far beyond anything the Irish state has previously shown it can do. The number of people in Direct Provision was only a fraction of what is being proposed here and that system was generally held to be a disaster.
Where is the strategy for school places – no-one has talked to the schools or teachers apparently – for providing health care, food, mental health services, and more. Its easy to virtue signal about taking refugees, but isn’t it entirely unrealistic to expect the same government who have left their own citizens in dire straits for basic necessities to suddenly become ultra-efficient in providing for another 100,000 people in need. Should we take in Ukrainian refugees? Yes. Should we be realistic about how many we can care for? Also yes, because to do otherwise is being dishonest to everyone.
There’s also the fact that everything feels like a shambles right now in Ireland. The country is a mess. The HSE lurches from one crisis to the next, sick people spending days on a trolley in hospital now seems perfectly normal, waiting lists are like something from a developing country, and this week we learned that a lack of step-down supports means patients – often older people – are being forced to stay in hospital ‘for up to two years’ after they should be discharged.
Maybe Simon Coveney and the rest of the Cabinet could get on with the job of fixing the country instead of making promises they can’t keep. Especially when those promises are being made to distressed and frightened people for whom we have no housing precisely because the same government has grievously failed to house their own people.