An Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, says he is “very worried about Irish society” because of the public response to the terrible mess that his government has made of immigration. He didn’t put it like that of course: instead, he said people were being othered because of their race and creed.
Context here is important. Martin had dropped the ball in a now-viral interview with Michael Dorgan of Fox News when he had been pressed on immigration, giving what my colleague Ben Scallan described as “questionable answers” when asked about the fact, for example, that 42% of the people on the Dublin social housing list were non-nationals.
In that instance, an Taoiseach said only Irish citizens are eligible for social housing (untrue) and then said Irish citizens are prioritised in terms of housing (untrue). There was more, and Martin looked under pressure and was flailing in response to some of the data relayed by Dorgan, such as that almost a quarter of the people now living in Ireland were born overseas.
Additional information has been released since that Fox News interview. As we reported, Independent TD Carol Nolan dragged data out of the government that showed 347,736 social welfare recipients were recorded as non-Irish nationals at the end of 2025. And we now know that the State’s Housing Agency has provided an “easy to read” guide on how to apply for social housing translated into 24 different languages, including Arabic, Georgian, Somali, and more.
That was all in the background then, when Martin spoke to journalists at the end of last week and claimed that “there’s a narrative growing in this country, which is trying to other people because of their colour, their race, their creed, and I think the vast, vast majority of Irish people recoil at this.”
He said that people were being targeted and attacked because of their ethnicity, something all decent people would deplore. There is no justification, ever, for racist violence. But Micheál Martin is trying to use the actions of a small few to shut down a conversation this country has been precluded from having for far too long.
An Taoiseach then added that “we always cherished children” – something families of children left in agony with scoliosis might disagree with – and added that language like ‘Ireland for the Irish’ is tantamount to incitement because violence was happening. His remarks about young people feeling unsafe visiting the city centre is deserving of the widely-expressed view online that it is Martin’s government who have presided over a soft-on-crime approach which has made a great many of us feel unsafe in our capital city.
“We need to be better” at calling out and dealing with racism, Martin said, but it sounded suspiciously like a man desperate to shut down a debate on immigration by rallying the establishment to shout-down the very significant majority who feel immigration is out of control, and those who are deeply concerned that, after centuries of struggling for freedom, that Ireland is fast losing her identity.
It’s deeply ironic, yet again, to hear a Fianna Fáil leader assert that something must be done to tackle the use of a phrase that was not only a rallying cry for the Easter Rising and of Pádraig Mac Piarais,in particular, but also of another leader who Martin has hailed as a national hero in our history, Daniel O’Connell.
As Prof Gerard Casey pointed out, the man known as Great Liberator also thundered that “we must have Ireland for the Irish”.
As Casey quipped: “Well, I suppose we’ll have to take down the statue of Daniel O’Connell on O’Connell Street, a few feet north of O’Connell Bridge, and rename the street and the bridge. After all, we surely can’t publicly honour a man who was guilty of uttering words that, according to Micheál Martin, are “unacceptable” and “tantamount to incitement”, now can we?”
But ignorance of history aside, the repeated attempts by senior Government representatives to shut down debate on immigration is ominous. For almost half a decade now, poll after poll has increasingly told Micheál Martin and the Cabinet that people want immigration curtailed, but the political and media response is endless distraction, denials and threats to shut down debate and limit speech.
What is sinister to me is that we are being told that certain speech is unacceptable at a time of unprecedented immigration, with change happening so fast that we have gone from a largely homogenous nation to a small country where 23% of people living here were born overseas – with 1.25 million persons, out of a population of just 5.5 million, in that cohort.
Both legal and illegal immigration is currently driving this change. The impact is alarming and, unless measures are immediately taken, likely irreversible.
The country is coming down with taxpayer-funded NGOs who are staffed and prepped to tackle racism and also call Irish people racist for opposing open borders. Coimisiún na Meán is dispersing tens of millions to media platforms happy to endlessly push diversity and everything that innocuous sounding mission entails. In addition, An Garda Siochána can – and should, and do – take action if people living here are threatened with thuggery.
But there are no publicly-funded NGOs to address a matter far more crucial to the Irish nation: the existential threat faced by a country where the percentage of foreign-born persons living here is increasing at a galloping rate and we are being told it is forbidden to even talk about it.
That is no exaggeration: the Irish people and our culture did not survive and endure for thousands of years through occupation, famine and dispossession to be told that we can have no input into what our nation is becoming, or that we are face political censure if we even discuss what it means, as the great Gaelic poet, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair, wrote that Ireland is “tír mo bhuinphréimhe” – the land not just of my heritage but my ancestors, my lineage and my deeply roots. We are not simply an industrial estate for the coming and going of global corporations, served by both a servile political establishment and the useful idiots of the left.
As ever, it is the proponents of mass immigration who lean most heavily into race when seeking to censor the debate. It matters not so much whether people are coming from Sweden or Somalia, from Chad or China – what matters is that the numbers are out of control and that Irish people have a right to our identity and to our culture.
As Gript reported this morning and last weekend, public interest and upset at the data being dragged out of the State that suggests Irish people are not, in fact being prioritised, cannot be dismissed anymore by some frowny statements from an Taoiseach or accusations of “backward-looking sovereignty”. It is time that Micheál Martin explains exactly who he thinks Ireland should be for.