On April 27th, 2019, just over five years ago, the Irish Examiner published the following figures:
The Irish authorities had the lowest rate of refusal to applications from asylum seekers of any of the EU’s 28 member states last year.
Only 15% of first-time decisions on asylum applications in Ireland were rejected, compared to an EU average of 63%.
A total of 1,275 asylum seekers in the Republic were granted protection last year, of which 815 were awarded refugee status.
On November 22nd of that same year, 2019, the Journal reported a splurge in spending on Asylum accommodations:
THE GOVERNMENT IS looking at housing thousands of asylum seekers in new Direct Provision centres in the coming years.
The numbers of people arriving to seek international protection in the state has risen 50% in the past year, according to the Department of Justice, and more centres are needed to prevent further applicants being housed in emergency accommodation.
The cost of the new centres will be in excess of €320 million in the coming years, the Irish Times reported this morning.
And, though self-praise might be gauche, on November 19th of that same year, 2019, yours truly wrote, emphasis added:
Government policy on immigration as it stands leaves people here for years, in limbo, with no ability to contribute to society or improve their own lives. It doesn’t prioritise those who can help the country. It doesn’t speedily remove those who cannot help the country, or who are a threat to it. And not one single member of the political class has the political skill to talk about it without making an utter balls of it.
It won’t end well.
All of this was five years ago, now. I’d gently suggest that my prediction that it wouldn’t end well has stood the test of time reasonably well.
The point I’m making here is not that I am some sort of genius with a special gift for foresight – were that true, I’d not be writing for Gript, but living a life of the most sinful decadence on a Caribbean island funded by my timely investments in bitcoin.
The point is that you didn’t have to be. You just had to be a relatively observant person with the basic willingness to state what was blindingly obvious to anybody with eyes: That the Irish state was running an immigration system with no particular rules, no clear objective, and no limits or controls of any kind on who could come here and stay here indefinitely. This was a mess waiting to happen, and a mess that duly has happened, in slow motion, with our leaders looking right at it and unable to figure out a single thing to say about it until it was too late.
Like most Irish policy failures, this one has a particular characteristic: The assumption that it would be all right on the night, and that those who were raising hard questions about it were motivated by something vaguely anti-Irish. Or, as one-time future star Imelda May put it in one of her interminable RTE appearances, “you don’t get to be Irish and racist”. Racism was never defined, but we all knew – and know – what it means. Asking questions that made RTE uncomfortable. Questioning immigration.
It is abundantly clear how the current mess happened: The Irish Government started with the proposition that Ireland is a good country and that immigration is a thing that good countries are for. That was both the beginning, and the end, of the policy: Immigration good, questioning immigration bad and anti-Irish.
Because Ireland was good, and because there’s a certain hopeful naivete to Irish politics which assumes that doing “good” will always prove the right thing, the policy really needed nothing more than to accommodate the thousands of people coming here and assume that everything would work out grand in the future. That might sound simplistic, but that’s because that’s exactly what Irish policy usually is: Simplistic.
In that 2019 piece, I argued that one of the big problems is the relatively low intellectual capacity of the average Irish politician. This was around the time of the UK election of that year, and I wrote the following:
Boris Johnson may well end up losing the British General election – but if he does, it won’t be because of his policy on immigration. For the last ten days he has hammered the opposition Labour Party for favouring an open immigration policy, with no restrictions on freedom of movement, while saying that if re-elected, and after Brexit, he will implement an “Australian style points-based immigration system”.
He has pointed out that a political party that says it wants to fund a health service, or housing, or any other public service must know how many people will need to use those services, and that unlimited immigration puts huge strain on public services. It’s a commonsense argument, one that people instinctively understand.
This was a basic, simple argument, I said, that anyone with a brain cell could make or understand. But Irish politicians thought they – and Ireland – were special, and that the attitudes of working class people in Northern England to uncontrolled immigration would not be the same, ultimately, as those of people in working-class Cork or Limerick. I went on:
“There are a couple of basic facts about immigration in Ireland that are completely obvious to anybody with a brain, and yet no politician seems able to articulate them without managing to say something inartful at best, or outright racist at worst:
The more people that we have in Ireland, the more homes we need, the more school places we need, the more hospital beds we need, and the greater the demand on our national infrastructure.
Those immigrants who do come here, if they eventually are to make the kind of lives here that we would hope for them, need to be equipped to thrive in our country, with language skills, an understanding of our laws and customs, and the education levels to get a job and hold it.
If you are not an Irish, or an EU citizen, there is no absolute right to live in Ireland, and the country is within its rights to deny you entry or remove you from the country.”
In a few weeks time, Ireland is set to vote in local and European elections. In the campaign for those elections, candidates for the Governing parties and much of the opposition will make specious and dishonest arguments along the lines that the recent crisis is, well, recent, and that nobody could have seen it coming, and that Ukraine is to blame.
But remember: All the quotes in this piece, from me and others, are from 2019. Long before the Ukraine War started – three years before, in fact.
One of the basic jobs of elected officials is to see things coming. There are some candidates running in these elections who did see this problem coming, and warned about it. Peter Casey and Niall Boylan, for example, as well as candidates for some of the smaller parties.
And then there are candidates who did not see any of this coming, despite the fact that it was blindingly obvious five years ago.
The question is a simple one: Who do you trust to see the issues that will matter in five years time?