You’d have to give a lot of credit to National Party Councillor Patrick Quinlan for his performance at this week’s meeting of Fingal County Council. He asked a relevant and important question, and managed to get the entirety of his fellow councillors to vote down his motion.
That question was a simple one: Of the people currently awaiting housing from Fingal County Council, how many of them are foreign nationals?
It is, as he pointed out, data that has previously been released. In 2011 – long before immigration was a political issue – figures released to Fine Gael Councillor Kieran Dennison showed that 51% of applicants for housing were foreign nationals. So, asked Quinlan, what is the figure today?
The council voted against releasing updated figures, by a vote of 29 to 1.
Here is his own video of the exchange:
What interests me here most is the flimsy and paper thin defences of not revealing this information by those who voted against it. The common theme appears to be that “it’s not relevant information”, or, in the words of a Sinn Fein councillor, “it would be like listing people by their religion”.
But of course, that’s nonsense: There’s a clear difference between religion and nationality when it comes to public housing, in that the purpose of the Irish state is not to serve any particular religion, but certainly is to serve one particular nationality. The point of having an Irish state – the whole reason so many innocent people were blown to pieces to achieve one – was reputedly that such a state would serve the interests of Irish people.
There’s another factor: Political arguments and debates need to be based on accurate and relevant information. Irish people are constantly told that they have a housing crisis, but that the housing crisis does not relate to immigration. Yet if – and it is an if – a majority of people on the waiting list for council homes were foreign born, then that would suggest strongly that immigration is directly impacting housing demand.
The Fingal Council voted not to reveal information that is directly relevant to the debate about immigration and housing and whether they are connected. That tells its own story, I think, about what that information might have shown.
In that sense, this is a moral victory for the National Party, and for Councillor Quinlan. And one should note, a very strange bit of conduct by Aontu’s two councillors who opposed the motion with the rest of the political parties. Aontú can fairly be asked why it is that they think the composition of the housing list by nationality is not information that the voters should have. That is not a vote that anybody who listened to Peadar Tóibín during the election campaign would reasonably have expected Aontú councillors to cast.
Let me tell you why I think they opposed it: It’ll have been on account of the National Party brand being so toxic and repellent that they were terrified more of “Aontú votes with National Party” than they were terrified of “Aontú votes with established parties”. That, I fear, is an error. If you can’t explain why you’re capable of voting with the National Party on an issue where that party is right, then you probably lack the confidence or communications skills for politics. Voting with them on this does not mean that you’re endorsing Justin Barrett and his little pot of gold.
The National Party brand is indeed toxic – a toxicity that has been well earned – and will likely remain so indefinitely. But that does not mean that the party cannot have effective public representatives. By getting elected despite the toxicity of his party brand, Councillor Quinlan has shown some talent for politics. And this motion, which puts him on the side of people who want access to information and puts everybody else on the side of hiding information, is very good politics.
As for the other parties, their loathing of the National Party may have blinded them to the fact that Quinlan was asking for perfectly relevant information. And that by voting against it, they were allowing Quinlan – perfectly accurately – to claim that he is the only councillor who wants the taxpayers of Fingal to have access to fairly basic information about who is on their housing list.
A victory, then, for Councillor Quinlan. Alas for him, I can’t imagine many other media outlets covering it.
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