It’s a Monday, which means it’s time to mark what is becoming a weekly tradition in Ireland: another brutal new poll for the Government on immigration. This one, courtesy of Amárach Research for the Irish Daily Mail, might be the worst one yet:
POLL/POBALBHREITH
Amárach Research / Irish Daily Mail
Q. “How do you assess current levels of immigration?”
Too High: 73%
About Right: 19%
Too Low: 3%Eanáir/January 2024
— Ireland Votes | #Vote2024 (@Ireland_Votes) January 13, 2024
POLL/POBALBHREITH
Amárach Research / Irish Daily Mail
Q. “How do you assess the Government’s handling of immigration?”
Neither Positive or Negative: 34%
Extremely Poor: 32%
Poor: 20%
Positive: 14%Eanáir/January 2024
— Ireland Votes | #Vote2024 (@Ireland_Votes) January 13, 2024
To recap, that’s more than half of the public who rate the Government’s handling of immigration as either “poor” or “very poor”, and almost three quarters of people who believe that levels of immigration are, for the moment, “too high”.
These figures hold, obviously, a significance for the national policy debate around immigration. If you were looking for any sign that they might impact Government policy, however, then those hopes were firmly smacked down by the Taoiseach over the weekend. Change policy? Not a hope, he told the Sunday Times. Instead, the coalition will “tackle immigration fears in public information campaign”:
“The Government is to roll out a new “robust strategy” to inform the public about immigration as tensions surrounding the issue rise across the country.
The coalition is anxious to dampen down misinformation about accommodating refugees and asylum seekers, and wants to “counter false impressions that Ireland has an open-door policy”.
In other words, your own money will be spent telling you that what, in most cases, you can see and hear yourself is, in fact, dangerous misinformation, and that the Irish Government’s handling of immigration is just fine and dandy, thanks very much.
The difficulty and risk for the Government here is straightforward enough: It’s very hard to maintain party discipline on an issue when hundreds of councillors and candidates for the council in the Government parties are facing a national election in just five months, and three quarters of the public are not buying what the Government are selling.
To put it another way: It is very likely that over the coming months, the public are going to be confronted with the spectacle of dozens, if not hundreds, of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael candidates for the county council telling voters on the doorsteps and on the local airwaves that their national party leadership is entirely wrong on immigration. And that further, a vote for the local FF or FG man is, in fact, a vote to “protect the local area” from the consequences of national FF or FG leadership.
This has already begun to happen: This day last week, yours truly reported conversations with the two Fianna Fáil (for the moment) Councillors in Connemara, Seamus Walsh and Noel Thomas, who have emerged as leading critics of the Government’s national policy. They have been joined in Ballinrobe by Fianna Fáil’s Damien Ryan. Word reaches these ears of at least three other FF candidates around the country who have sworn blind on various doorsteps in recent weeks that they staunchly oppose Micheál Martin’s Government on immigration.
All of this, it should be said, before any local independent candidates pledged to an anti-immigration stance have started entering contests in any great numbers. When that happens, the forces of political gravity will exert themselves yet further.
What are the practical consequences of this for the Government? Well, there are a few:
First, it will become very hard for Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin to conduct effective campaigns in the run-in to the EU and local elections, for the simple reason that many of their own local candidates may not wish to be seen dead with them. Traditionally, in Irish elections, the local councillors form the welcoming committee and the phalanx of support for the national leaders on their campaign tours of the country – but what county council candidate, fighting for his or her political future, is going to want to be seen standing beside Varadkar or Martin as they explain that local concerns about immigration are just based on misinformation and fear?
Second, the political impact will be to further isolate the Government and – almost as importantly – the national media from the growing swathe of the public that’s not buying what the governing class is selling. Outside of Dublin, local media, and in particular local radio stations, are probably even more important than RTE in shaping perceptions of national politics. A Government deprived of its local allies to fight battles for it on local radio is a Government that is going to be in rough shape come election time.
The worst part is that almost none of this can be avoided. As the polling demonstrates, the forces of political gravity are now reaching terminal force: Only candidates with a political death wish will openly embrace a position that 75% of the public disagrees with. The best that Dublin can hope for is that many candidates try simply to avoid the immigration issue altogether, and run on straightforward “fresh new voice for the area” platforms.
The prospects for the Government’s new “robust strategy to inform the public”, by the way, seem pretty dim to me. The problem is not the communications. It is, and remains, the policy.