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If you are forced to listen, for whatever reason, to the regular litany of charges laid against the so-called “far right” in Ireland, then you will know that top of the list is that the “far right” “turns communities against each other”.
The theory behind the charge is fairly straightforward: If you are a man or woman of the left, then you know who the true enemy is. It is the global forces of big capital and neoliberalism, against whom the downtrodden should unite. In order to achieve the revolution, the theory goes, we should be seeing working class downtrodden Irish people linking arm in arm with migrants and the oppressed masses of the world to unite against the bankers and the bonuses.
When people pipe up, then, and say “but we don’t have room for migrants in this particular village”, they are not just being racist and bigoted – they are also doing the work of international finance capital, or whatever the latest buzzword is, for them. Rather than uniting, they are dividing. Because, the theory goes, the interests of the Irish working class and the interests of migrants are one and the same. If only they would unite, the revolution would surely come. It’s an old song, and a bad one, but you can sing it on the radio and get sympathetic sounds from radio presenters, so it will never go away.
The trouble with it is simple enough: The interests of the Irish working class and many of the people coming here to avail of our broken immigration system are not the same. In fact, those interests are in direct conflict. That was spelled out, fairly clearly, over the weekend, in the Irish Times:
Sites already earmarked for social housing should not be ruled out as potential locations for modular homes for refugees, according to the Minister tasked with the rollout of 700 units for people fleeing the war in Ukraine.
Minister of State for the Office of Public Works (OPW) Patrick O’Donovan has said he “personally would not see a difficultly” with places designated for housing being used for the modular homes, suggesting it could result in mixed tenure housing estates in the future.
The planned 700 modular homes were ordered at the end of 2022 but suitable locations have not yet been confirmed for all of them to be installed.
The equation here is fairly simple: If a house that was earmarked in an original plan for an Irish person on a housing list goes instead to a migrant who has only just arrived into the country, then in that exchange there is a clear winner, and a clear loser. The loser is the person who has lost their spot, and the winner is the one that has gained it.
Even if the exchange is not as direct, there is still a winner and a loser. If, for example, the proposal ends up being to put modular homes in as additions to pre-existing projects, then those projects become more crowded, and become different places to live in than they would have been before Minister O’Donovan signed his order. Again, there is one party who gets somewhere to live (the winner) and one party who sees his or her estate become more crowded and observes the infrastructure being put under strain (the loser).
It is not the “far right” that is creating these winners and losers, but our own Irish Government. It is doing so in the face of public opinion polling showing that 70% or more of the public believe that the country has already taken in more migrants and refugees than it can safely accommodate.
The pattern here is not limited to this one proposal by Minister O’Donovan. We have already seen, in recent weeks, Irish nursing homes being re-purposed from their original purpose (looking after the Irish elderly) to a new purpose (accommodating migrants). In that exchange, there are also winners and losers. The winners get more beds, but the losers in this case are those Irish elderly people who need care in their dotage and find the options being limited.
That the “winners” in these transactions are not to blame for being winners is hardly the point: Nobody can blame a migrant of any stripe who comes here for a better life and gets one. But that fact does not trump human nature. If the Government were trying deliberately to ferment anti-migrant sentiment in Ireland, they could not be doing much more than they are to achieve that goal.
A fair immigration system must, at the very basic level, be fair to those seeking to make a new life here. But that alone is not sufficient: It must also be fair to those people already here. Taking services and opportunities away from our own people to give those same services and opportunities to new arrivals is transparently unfair to the losers in that exchange, who receive almost nothing in return.
The thing they do receive, if you listen to the Government and its boosters on this topic, is ephemeral. They get “diversity” and a sense that they live in a “compassionate country”. For those without much material worth to sacrifice, that’s a pretty low return on seeing your own services gutted. It also – and this is a very basic error – tends to link the notion of “diversity” with the notion of poor people in Ireland becoming relatively poorer.
The conditions for serious – and unpleasant – political upheaval in Ireland are converging. And the Government itself is entirely and wholly to blame. Not the “far right”. Not “racism”. Not any of those things: The Government is entirely to blame.
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