It was interesting, I thought, that nobody appeared to ask the Minister for Justice any of the interesting follow-up questions that might ordinarily have arisen in the aftermath of this statement, which she made towards the tail end of last week:
Justice Minister Helen McEntee has said an anti-refugee/asylum seeker sentiment has emerged in Ireland as the country tries to accommodate thousands of Ukrainian war refugees as well as international protection applicants in the midst of the housing crisis.
She said that, despite apparent growing unrest over a surge in asylum seekers to Ireland, including some who are sleeping on the streets due to a lack of suitable accommodation, the Government was not planning on closing its borders to those fleeing “war and persecution”.
It would be strange, after all, if “anti-refugee/asylum seeker sentiment” were suddenly to emerge in the populace from nowhere. Most people would agree that the long history of humanity is not littered with examples of people who were not racist or bigoted suddenly developing those bigotries. Bigotries tend to be long-engrained, and may lie dormant, but they do not spontaneously erupt from nowhere. Even the most famous and awful example of prejudice in the last century – that targeting the Jews of Europe – did not come from nowhere. Anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe is as old as modern civilization.
But it would be strange, I think, if there was a sudden outbreak of anti-Ukrainian bigotry in Ireland. This country has no historic relationship with the peoples of Ukraine, or any history on which to base such bigotry. Heretofore, at least, there was no reason to suspect that Ireland was home to some kind of latent anti-Ukrainian sentiment that has suddenly re-emerged.
Let me offer, if I may, an alternative suggestion, and you can decide whether you agree with it or not.
The “sentiment” about which the Minister was talking is not really anti-refugee, or anti-asylum seeker at all. It is in fact anti-Government.
It is not the fault of a Ukrainian person, or an African person, or a Middle Eastern person if the Irish Government announces that it will accommodate them in Ireland at Irish expense in officially unlimited numbers. The people who come here fleeing war are, in the main, coming at the express invitation of the Government. When Gript media interviewed one such person, a man from Egypt, last week, he told us he came here because the Government made it very clear, through the international media, that he would be able to get a visa in this country, but not the United Kingdom. You can watch that interview here.
EXCLUSIVE: An Egyptian asylum seeker told Gript that he lived in the UK for 15 years working on the black market, but travelled to Ireland after hearing about Justice Minister Helen McEntee’s open visa policy.https://t.co/fkCi1jzik1 pic.twitter.com/gf05a5CpZt
— gript (@griptmedia) September 8, 2022
The gentleman himself is blameless. He has done only what any rational person in his position would.
And this is where the nasty little rhetorical trick I mention in the headline above comes in, because what the Minister is doing is to try to re-cast opposition to her policies as opposition instead to migrants and refugees. It’s not her decisions you object to, in this interpretation: It’s black people and minorities.
And of course, our media lapped it up, and published it, without so much as a word of objection. The National Union of Journalists should really consider re-branding as the national union of stenographers.
The truth of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of the growing number of people who are voicing unease at the country’s immigration policy are doing so with great reluctance, primarily because we have a national identity as a welcoming people, and few would wish to compromise that or make those who are here as our guests feel unwelcome. What they oppose is not migrants, but an immigration policy which increases our population at a rate greater than that which our resources in terms of housing and health and infrastructure can possibly sustain. The result of that policy is that the Government is building cities of tents for migrants, and cannot find homes either for migrant populations or their own people.
That is not so much a policy as it is an outbreak of mania in the ruling class in which there appears to be a determination that it would be preferable to lead the country into crisis rather than to risk being thought of for even half a second as being in any way right wing.
But that outbreak of mania is leading them to make a fundamental mistake. Because the anger that is growing in the population is not directed towards refugees and immigrants. It is directed towards them.