The basic “gist” of today’s latest report from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) into “anti migrant extremism” on the island of Ireland was predictably and dutifully carried by all of the country’s major mainstream media outlets yesterday. That “gist”? That essentially there is now “co-operation” between people from a loyalist background in Northern Ireland, and those from a nationalist background in the Republic, when it comes to their respective objections to immigration levels in both jurisdictions.
The report is perhaps best summed up by the following paragraph:
“Although organised a month before the Ballymena unrest unfolded, Irish nationalists held a demonstration on 14 June in Cork that echoed many of the same themes seen in Northern Ireland. While there is no evidence of direct coordination, the protest reflects a growing convergence of narratives and shared grievances across traditionally distinct ideological and geographic contexts”
Nationalism and loyalism of the flag-waving variety are, it is fair to say, both primarily movements of the urban working class. It would hardly be surprising, you might think, that the urban working class in a nationalist community in cork would have similar perspectives on migration to those of the urban working class in a loyalist community in Ballymena. When the ISD talks about “shared grievances”, we are all apparently to stand back in amazement at the notion that loyalists and nationalists might experience the same thing in broadly similar ways.
Presumably they also experience rain and sunshine in broadly similar ways, though that doesn’t ever seem to warrant a “report”.
This rather banal observation might lead a cynical observer to conclude that the purpose (or at least a helpful side effect) of the latest ISD report was to effectively smear both working class loyalists and nationalists by associating them with their supposed mortal enemies on the other side of the orange/green divide. After all, no true Orangeman would admit to sharing breakfast, let alone a political platform, with a fenian. And vice versa.
This dynamic interests me as a writer because of how at odds it is with the narrative around immigration protests in general: Anybody who has spent even five minutes listening to somebody from an organisation like the ISD talking about immigration over the last decade or so will certainly have heard somebody make the claim that anti-immigration protests are about “dividing deprived communities” and “seeking to make migrants the scapegoats” and so on. Odd then that an ISD report would so transparently seek to divide working class communities on this island into neat and mutually opposed camps based on a nearly 400-year old battle near Drogheda that was ultimately decided by a particularly well trained battalion of Dutchmen.
My colleague Matt Treacy, of course, is amongst many people in the broad nationalist camp in Irish politics who sympathises with the notion that working class unity north and south should not be permitted to compromise much older and more principled divisions. As a matter of pure strategy and common sense, I would tend to empathise with the view that standing toe to toe with your old tribal enemy is a weird way to try and win majority support from your own community.
But all of this is ultimately academic, because no matter how many reports that the ISD publishes into “anti migrant extremism”, it remains stubbornly ignorant of the root cause: Extreme immigration policy.
The single reason – and I do mean the single reason – why so-called “anti migrant extremism” is on the rise amongst urban working class communities north and south and across the religious and political divide on the island is that urban working class communities are experiencing dramatic and negative consequences from immigration.
This manifests itself in dozens of different ways: Classrooms with large numbers of children who do not speak English, compromising the education of those who do. Increased competition for limited housing. Increased levels of crime and anti-social behaviour, experienced in those communities as being connected to an increase in foreign born men. A general sense that the demographics of their communities – and therefore the cohesion of their communities – are changing at a dramatic and unsustainable rate.
In response to this, those in power in both jurisdictions on the island have two options. They can amend immigration policy to address the concerns of the urban working class, or they can stand back in baffled amazement while perceptions of the threat grow so large as to make even loyalists and nationalists unite in anger.
Thus far, our leaders have managed only to choose option “b”.
As for the media? They rushed yesterday to cover the ISD report as if the real scandal in the country was that nationalists and loyalists on the island had something in common. The narrative – the official story – around this kind of thing in Ireland is that the danger posed by urban working class communities to the authority of the state is much more important than the danger posed by the state to those communities in turn.
But then again, the Irish media prides itself on “diversity” in all things. Just don’t expect it to employ many people who come from the kind of urban working class communities of mainly poor white people that it is so fond of denouncing as problematic.
We’ve seen this playbook in other countries. All the ISD reports in the world won’t solve the problem that they purport to identify. To do that, politicians need to do the one thing they utterly refuse to do: Control immigration.
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