If you watched The Tonight Show on Virgin Media last night you probably noticed that things got a bit fiery.
The show was as unbalanced as discerning viewers of the Irish media will hopefully by now have come to expect, with Gript’s John McGuirk the sole representative of the view – shared by 75% of the electorate – that we have a problem with immigration.
The debate quickly descended into Minister of State Neale Richmond deciding to repeatedly shout over John’s arguments in what this writer feels was a blatant attempt to avoid having to address any of them.
Perhaps at this point it’s too much to ask for an Irish broadcasting service to stick to ‘pesky’ rules like having a balanced panel when engaging in political debate. In fact, the presenter did a fair bit of interrupting herself.
Indeed, in Ireland the overton window of ‘acceptable’ opinions has swung so far left that anyone who does not agree with government policy is simply dismissed with terms like “spreading hate”, “far-right”, “mis/disinformation”, “racist”, etc etc ad infinitum.
I think last night’s debate was a perfect example of this.
Over the last few months I can clearly remember reading about certain developments in the Irish political sphere and thinking, ‘Why do we even have a government?’
Listening to Neale Richmond last night caused me to ask this question again.
Richmond more or less claimed that Ireland’s – in many people’s view – out of control immigration numbers are a mere consequence of the changing winds and that the government is simply powerless to change things.
If that’s true, why do we even have a government?
"Your policy has produced this situation, nobody elses" – Gript Editor @john_mcguirk and Fine Gael Minister Neale Richmond have a heated exchange on the immigration crisis in Ireland.https://t.co/jjKSPzl3X6 pic.twitter.com/s2MjRMJ1yQ
— gript (@griptmedia) January 9, 2024
Richmond whipped out political buzzwords like Ireland having “legal and moral obligations” to take in unlimited numbers of migrants seemingly – like many of his colleagues – without a care for what negative effects unlimited immigration is having on the Irish people.
Not his problem, you would think.
When asked to qualify his claim that Ireland has a “legal obligation” to accept unlimited numbers of migrant, he simply went on a mini-filibuster and did not answer the question.
Although not a government minister in any shape or form, this writer can tell you that Ireland does not have a legal obligation to accept unlimited numbers of migrants be they asylum seekers or otherwise.
Addressing this question, my colleague Dr. Matt Treacy wrote in an article about EU Directive 2001/55/EC:
“The relevant EU Directive, as Gript has several times referred to, is 2001/55/EC which sets out the criteria for “giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons and on measures promoting a balance of efforts between Member States in receiving such persons and bearing the consequences thereof.”
As we have repeatedly pointed out: the EU Directive on Temporary Protection allows the state to impose a limit due to capacity. The Irish government chose to ignore that – and insisted that our international obligations meant no limit could apply.
As we said previously, the Directive is not, as sections of the Irish establishment have claimed and as Minister Roderic O’Groman appears to believe, a charter for taking in unlimited numbers without any questions being asked of them, and without any conditions being imposed.
It is especially not, or ought not to be, a licence for persons who are travelling back and forth to the country they are fleeing, and who are clearly abusing the host state’s hospitality.”
Richmond claimed that the statements of Carla O’Connor – a protestor from Ballinrobe who appeared via a pre-recorded interview – of (surprise, surprise) being “littered with disinformation and misinformation”.
Seconds afterwards he engaged in his own bit of misinformation claiming that “we have 457 people fleeing war and persecution in this country who need accommodation” – a reference to the 457 people who have come to Ireland claiming asylum and who are now homeless.
But, as Richmomd, well knows, there is no certainty that the 457 people are, in fact, fleeing war and persecution. This is a ‘government trope’ because until the applications are adjudicated neither he nor anyone else knows if they are actual refugees or economic migrants.
What we do know is that – according to the government’s own figures – the largest number of arrivals to Ireland are from Nigeria and Algeria (Georgia and Algeria in 2022) – countries which are not war-torn.
Richmond accused O’Connor of using an “old trope about unvetted males” including in his critic a denial of widely reported facts that thousands of those who come to Ireland in order to make asylum claims destroy their identity documents before doing so calling it “utter rubbish”.
An asylum seeker – whether they do so in good faith or otherwise – is a person who simply arrives on our shores and says ‘I am seeking asylum’.
After this, the validity of their claim is assessed while they are in the interim accommodated and financially supported by the Irish state. You don’t have to be any kind of a genius to see how this system is ripe for abuse by economic migrants.
Last year, I reported figures from the Department of Justice which said that 5,074 people came to Ireland claiming asylum with either no travel documents or fake travel documents in 2022 alone. It is a clear and obvious fact that a person who has a) no documents or b) fake documents is ‘unvetted’ as the state simply does not know anything about them.
The show’s host Claire Brock then described John McGuirk “an unvetted male” in a groundbreaking example of comparing apples to oranges. John rightly pointed out that Irish people undergo garda vetting in many instances. In addition, as everyone knows, your application for a passport must be signed off by a garda or other legal authority.
Richmond also claimed that asylum applicants had their fingerprints checked against Interpol and Europol and that “most of them are actually taken from camps and processed through European Union resettlement.”
But the Justice Minister Helen McEntee recently said that each applicant “has their fingerprint checked against the Eurodac system which allows officials to establish if the applicant has previously applied for international protection in another member state”.
A check against Eurodac does not check for criminal records unless it is requested as “last resort”, the database administrators said.
If Richmond has additional and verified information, he should make that known. Instead, he was busy positing the view that suggestions that local communities should be allowed to have a veto on who moves into their area was leading people to “extremes”.
Early on in the show he almost blew a gasket when John pointed to his having voted against a development plan which included a halting site.
He said John was “falsely accusing him” claiming that he had voted against “an overall development plan” – which I suppose just so happened to include a halting site – accusing McGuirk of “misrepresentation of facts.”
Curiously Richmond doesn’t seem to have taken issue with the contents of the Irish Independent article John was referring to which has been around since October 2015….
He also accused John McGuirk of seeking a cap on immigration as if that was a bad thing, instead of a policy which, polls indicate, is supported by the vast majority of the people. Has there ever been a government more out of touch with the people they are tasked with representing?
As John was correctly referring to the government’s policy of accepting unlimited numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, Richmond seems to have decided that he’d simply shout him down for a period of about 2 minutes – I’m serious watch it back – after which he repeated his use of the words “misinformation” before ending with “I’ll leave it at that”.
Not exactly impressive.
What we saw on Virgin Media last night was a high level government minister denying reality in what was little more than the political equivalent of a surly teenager sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting ‘la la la’ while being scolded by his parents.
You might think that the Irish people deserve more than that from their public representatives.
Maybe at a time when basic necessities like housing, education, and access to healthcare are becoming increasingly scarce, being dismissed with “old tropes” like Richmond’s like that taking in unlimited numbers of migrants “is the right thing to do” just isn’t good enough anymore. Why do we even have a Government, if this is the most it can muster?
You can watch the full recording of the Tonight Show here.