I present to you, unedited, comments made in the Dáil in recent days by Labour TD Gerald “Ged” Nash, the right honourable representative for Louth. The good deputy was responding to Simon Harris’s intervention last week, in response to my colleague Ben Scallan (who has gotten the precise sum of zero credit for asking the question that sparked this row), on the subject of immigration:
“Last week, what the Tánaiste did was make some extraordinary comments, he left them hanging there, and quite simply, as far as I’m concerned, they appear to be the kinds of comments that you hear from a misinformed bloke in the pub who gets his information from Facebook.”
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I’m old enough to remember a time when the Labour Party fancied themselves the natural home of blokes in the pub. Alas, no longer. Now, blokes in the pub are the sort of despicable low-lives that respectable people simply do not quote in polite society. That says a lot, I think, about how the Labour Party views the ordinary person.
It is of course true that the “bloke in the pub” is wrong about lots of things (though these usually relate to penalty decisions against Premier League soccer teams or how we could abolish the national debt by paying politicians nothing and making the Taoiseach fly Ryanair) and may occasionally fall victim to misinformation. But I’ll come back to a point I’ve made a few times recently: The bloke in the pub is not usually wrong because the bloke in the pub is usually informed by instinct. And instincts have a good evolutionary basis.
Here, for example, is Fintan O’Toole’s strongest possible critique of Simon Harris, thundered from his pulpit in the Irish Times yesterday:
“This is a three-card trick. The first card is inward migration – the approximately 94,000 people coming into Ireland. The second card is the number of people who seek asylum in Ireland: 18,560 last year. The third is the small proportion (seven per cent) of those who were refused asylum and were awaiting deportation: 1,287.
The trick is to switch the cards and make the 1,287 stand for the whole 94,000. Why? Because it sends the none too subtle message that the whole 94,000 “do not have a right to be here”.”
Here is the difference between the enlightened intellectual and the bloke in the pub: The former notes with a wry, slightly weary smile that Simon Harris has got his figures wrong: Why, only seven per cent of asylum seekers have their applications rejected. The bloke in the pub by contrast might ask “how is it that only seven per cent of asylum seekers have their applications rejected and are awaiting deportation?”
The other point the bloke in the pub might make is that 94,000 people is, in fact, rather a large number of people to import into a country that has a housing shortage and may struggle to build anywhere close to 30,000 homes per year. In fact, assuming we did manage to build 30,000 homes this year, and put three people to a home, all of those homes would be taken up by inward migration numbers alone, leaving four thousand people on the outside looking in. And that’s just accounting for migration figures.
The bloke in the pub, presumably, can do those sums as easily as I can.
Fintan then turns, as is his wont, to predictions of doom should any or all of this cease:
This leaves around 63,000 people coming in from non-EU and non-UK countries. Some of these people are Ukrainians who have been given refugee status. The vast majority of the rest are here on student visas or work permits. Those in the latter category range from construction workers to hospitality staff to nurses and doctors to specialists brought in by multinational companies.
So how many of these people does Harris believe to be too many?
He could, certainly, send home the 20,000 students from India, the US, China and Canada – thus triggering the financial implosion of most of Ireland’s third-level institutions.
This old canard – that the economy would collapse absent inward migration – bears some examination. Note that I am not proposing the complete suspension of inward migration here – hardly anybody is – but just examining the argument Fintan makes that were it to end, we would be laden down with doom and busted universities.
The first thing to say, as my colleague Matt Treacy regularly notes, is that a great many of those 94,000 people are coming here to work in Ireland’s tech sector, to advance the profitability of American companies who, in turn, pay 15% of their profits to the Irish exchequer. This is of course entirely at odds with the official story, which is that those companies almost exclusively employ Irish graduates. In fact, what is happening is that Irish people not employed by those companies are being crowded out of their own cities by well-paid foreigners, and all they get in return is 15% in corporate tax rates on the profits those companies make. The US companies here are bigger winners than the average Irish house-hunter.
The second thing here is that labour shortages, should they occur, are good for workers.
This is basic economics: The more rare a resource is, the more people will pay for it. The Irish left embraces a bizarre psychosis around this where, on the one hand, they insist on constantly increasing the minimum wage, and on the other hand they insist on diluting the labour market by importing what Fintan charmingly describes as “hospitality staff”. What he ignores is that the September live register showed 169,000 people unemployed in the state, of which 71% – more than 100,000 people – were Irish.
So yes, we are importing labour (often to do unskilled work) while sitting on 100,000 unemployed Irish people. The man in the pub, I’d wager, might question that too.
The final factor is, of course, the foreign students: But we’ve covered that here on Gript. 841 Irish students wanted to become dentists as their first choice in the CAO after the leaving cert of 2023, but only about 100 of them were able to train. Why? Because about 50% of Irish university capacity for dental training goes to foreign students.
And what happens? We do not produce enough dentists of our own (while training the world’s) and then need to import dentists from abroad. And if you are a man in the pub who finds that questionable, Ged Nash will sneer at you while pointing (one imagines) to Fintan’s article on how you do not understand the numbers.
So here’s the thing: Give the big American multinationals their work permits, if you are scared of them leaving. But put an end to migration by low-skilled workers and halve the number of foreign students. While we are at it, increase the deportation rate for asylum seekers to something more reasonable: Let’s say 10,000 out of 18,000.
Do all that and you get inward migration down to 50,000 per year. Which would substantially ease the pressure on housing. I think the man in the pub might agree with that. And look, if he’s wrong, then Ged Nash and Fintan O’Toole can tell us all that they told us so.
And if they’re wrong, they can accept it with good grace. As they always do.