It’s time to close the door on asylum applicants and on this reckless, dangerous, deeply divisive asylum system that is creating so much anger and harm and chaos. Unless the government wants to send the unfortunate members of an Gardaí Síochana out to pepper-spray the whole country, they need to realise that, after Citywest, enough is enough.
Almost the entire political establishment, with the exception of a few brave Independents, Independent Ireland, and Aontú, have long been seriously out of step with the people on this issue. In fact, most of the talking heads now making mealy-mouthed noises of distress about Citywest have for years been gaslighting and bullying the Irish people who want the right to object to the unprecedented and harmful changes that are being forced on our country.
The deniers of that obvious evident harm are out in force, and, as predicted, the usual deflections are being tried out. At time of writing (Wednesday evening) RTÉ is wall-to-wall with tutting coverage of the Citywest protests. The Irish Times curiously did not publish even one of the sort of searing opinion pieces one might expect after a 10-year-old girl had allegedly been sexually assaulted, while the Irish Examiner’s columnists are writing about the Presidential debate and Prince Andrew. This photo being circulated on X captures the extent of the media lockstep – with the exception of the Irish Sun who correctly noted the victim was “failed by the state”.
Nothing to see here, except the usual criticism of the awful racist Irish, because stone-throwing (which almost no-one condones) is far more evil than child-rape, it appears. Minister Jim O’Callaghan is out tough-talking this morning about arresting, naming and punishing protesters who over-step the line. It’s a useful distraction from his failure to deport a man now accused of child sex abuse, I suppose. This time, however, it feels like far fewer people can be that easily distracted. There’s a growing awareness that maybe, just maybe, the focus on protests is being used as a whitewash: used to avoid confronting the vileness of a charge of serious sexual assault on a child – on a ten-year-old girl – and to distract from the fact that the government and the oppositon are wholly responsible for the conditions which facilitated this horror.
Last night, RTÉ News read out the names and addresses of the five men arrested at the Citywest protest on Tuesday night. But we still don’t know the name of the asylum seeker who is accused of sexually assaulting a child. Labour MEP Aodhán Ó Riordán was out condemning the “far-right” as usual. In the Dáil, SocDems TDs Liam Quaide scolded the “dangerous narrative” that there was a “clear conflation made between delayed deportation and a risk to children”.
The “dangerous narrative” is the insistence on ignoring the evidence even after a child has been sexually assaulted. The accused, an African asylum seeker, should not have been in this country. A deportation order was issued against him in March. He is likely having his appeal against that order funded by the taxpayer. Why wouldn’t he? Everyone knows the Irish authorities are soft. But the media and politicians – and this is a truly vile collaboration – focus on a burning Garda van while the sexual assault of a ten-year old girl is coyly described as an “incident”.
There are so many “incidents” now, aren’t there? The murder of Ashling Murphy, blamed on the awfulness of Irish men when it was a Roma man that stabbed her to death while she was out for a run. The decapitation and gruesome murders of two gay men, Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee, by Yousef Palani in Sligo. The media tried to blame that on generalised homophobia, lest the spectre of Islamophobia might arise from the recognition that Palani’s deranged thinking might have been motivated by something other than the bad weather west of the Shannon.
The slashing of innocent children and their teachers in Parnell Square: another ‘incident’ where an Algerian has been charged with attempted murder, but has still not been brought to trial after two years. Then we have the endless parade of migrants before the courts on sexual assault and rape charges, some literally landed off the plane – for example this degenerate, Randi Gladstone (41), formerly from Guyana who had only been in Ireland for a few days before he raped, sexually assaulted and falsely imprisoned an 18 young woman.
There are more “incidents”: the appalling rape and assault of up 21 elderly women, many suffering with dementia, by a Nigerian care assistant in a nursing home – while in the past week a homeless foreign national, Hasan Ali Gori, has been charged over the murder of “beloved pensioner Josephine Ray (89)”.
Then there’s the fact that we are now hosting an Albanian mafia in Ireland apparently, something you don’t see featured in the ‘New to the Parish’ series in the Irish Times, though it could be argued they add a certain flavour to the new diversity of scumbaggery in the country. We’re also home to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of members of the charming Nigerian Black Axe gang with their “ultra-violent” origins. Then there’s the increased trafficking of unfortunate people into the country, and the sickening scoping report about Rotherham-type predatory gangs, but no-one wants to discuss either subject much, because some stones are better left unturned, or so we’re led to believe by the general indifference and inaction of the authorities.
And then, in just one short week, the terrifying brutality of the murder of 17-year-old Ukrainian, Vadym Davydenko, who was stabbed in a frenzied attack more than 100 times. And now a little girl, inexplicably in Citywest when she was meant to be in the ‘care’ of Tusla, has allegedly been sexually assaulted by a brute in his twenties, an attack almost too hideous to contemplate.
“Incident” after “incident”, victim after victim, violence heaped upon violence. And we are just supposed to look away. Enough. We’ve had enough. We will not accept that this is “the new normal”.
The whole situation is wildly, dangerously, out of control. The authorities have allowed more than 22,000 people, at the last count, into the country without a passport or checking their criminal records. The Department of Justice is belatedly describing some of them as “imposters“. Yet, there has been no recognition of just how irresponsible and potentially perilous this actually is. People may have many reasons for destroying the passport they used to board the plane but for an unknown proportion the motivation will be to hide who they really are. Only the deliberately or stupidly naïve – or those who lecture the rest of us while they live in leafy suburbs far, far from the IPAS centres dumped on other communities – imagine this is not for nefarious purposes.
And the numbers are staggering: 22,000 people is the population of Athlone. The NGOs can shriek all they like, the claim of “unvetted males” is all-too-often true.
Even the minister says that 80% of asylum claimants will fail their first asylum application, yet they are housed and helped while the homelessness numbers in Ireland continue to set new records and the court cases keep being heard. The situation isn’t just insane and untenable. It is a tinder keg waiting to blow.
As local people warned again and again, Citywest wasn’t just a travesty, it was inevitable, but they were shouted down and demonised and called “far-right” and “racist” for pointing out the bloody obvious just as the people in East Wall and Santry and Newtownmountkennedy were.
But as I said above, they can’t pepper-spray the whole country. Instead of only condemning public anger, the government must protect its people.
So forget our goddamned “international obligations” and focus on our national responsibilities and our rights: the right of the Irish people to be heard, to be safe, to decide on who can come to live here and how and when. Protect the right of teachers to go for a run, and the right of children not to be raped, and the right of genuine refugees not to be stabbed a hundred times, and the right of local people to decide whether they want hundreds or thousands of unvetted men being dumped on their communities.
We should follow the example of Denmark whose government decided to put its own citizens first and introduce highly restrictive asylum policies aiming to achieve a “zero refugee” goal.
The pretence that we can house any more asylum applicants is, in any case, ridiculous. It only serves to give the nauseating NGOs and the open-borders politicians warm, cuddly feelings – and we are now paying for their self-righteousness in the most horrific way possible. No-one without identification can be allowed in. Then we need an urgent task force to investigate and establish the real identity of those who were allowed to enter the country without passports, and we need mass deportations. As happened in Denmark, those who have come to live here and endlessly sponge off the taxpayer like the extended Puska family can go home too. Whatever laws need to be changed to allow this to happen, change them. Enough is enough.
Will our weak, reprehensible, and ideologically-hidebound government listen? Probably not. In that case, the best way to upend the system and to punish those who have facilitated this appalling vista is not to fire stones, but to get organised. This government was returned to power because increasing numbers of voters are so disillusioned that they won’t engage. But the next election will come along in the blink of an eye. In the meantime, close the doors. We are full. And we’ve had enough.