One in four Irish people now list immigration as their number one issue for politicians heading in to 2024. That was just one of a series of brutal findings for the Government – and indeed the wider political and media class – in the latest Ireland Thinks series for the Sunday Independent over the weekend.
One way of measuring the problems for the political class, I think, is to gauge the difference between how many people are internalising their messaging, and how many people appear to be rejecting it. A good way of measuring this is to compare the number of people in Ireland who say that the number one issue facing the country is “the rise of the far right” versus the number who say it is immigration, since it’s fair to say your attitude to one of these issues likely influences your attitude to the other.
As it happens, the results are clear: 13% worry about the rise of the far right. 25%, almost double that, worry more about immigration. Which is almost a picture-perfect reversal of what you might expect those concerns to be, if you got your news solely from reading mainstream Irish newspapers or listening to mainstream Irish radio, where concerns about immigration are generally presented as the preserve of the far right, and concerns about the rise of the far right are generally presented as the obligation of decent people.
What’s more, when you get into the weeds on immigration, it gets much worse: 25% of people say it is their top issue, but local community opposition is much, much deeper: 45% admit in the poll that they would be concerned about the imposition of a migrant accommodation centre in their community, against 41% who would not be concerned. That tends to strongly undermine the already wobbly insistence from many quarters that local opposition to such centres is the result of some kind of far-right infiltration.
Is there extremism? Well, some: 12% of the public say that they’re entirely unconcerned about the burning of migrant accomodation centres, which is an extraordinarily high number. 48%, meanwhile, express outrage at such actions, which is – when you think about it – actually an extraordinarily low number.
The biggest winners politically in the poll were also telling: Independent candidates are up 3% to 17%, and while Independents are not exclusively the repository of anti-immigration voters, they’re about as close as we get in Ireland at the moment. The two civil war parties, meanwhile, are down an identical amount.
The scariest thing for the Government in all of this is that there is no reason to think these concerns have peaked, or are likely to ebb away: Already in 2024, we have had the Minister responsible for much of the management of immigration, Roderic O’Gorman, pledge the construction of multiple new accomodation centres, and noises from him that suggests he expects a further 15,000 people this year at minimum, meaning that it is inevitable that more and more communities will experience their own immigration flashpoints. If past is prologue, these local incidents tend to radicalise communities, and not in the direction of being more concerned about the “far right”.
What’s more: the top issues in the poll are not immigration, but two issues related to it. Housing, and the cost of living. The danger for the Government is that housing becomes increasingly linked in the public mind to immigration, to the extent that it is not already so connected. This connection will be harder and harder to deny as more Government resources are poured into accommodating migrants in 2024 while thousands of Irish people struggle to get onto the property ladder.
And there’s a final weakness: At 44%, believe it or not, Micheál Martin is the most approved-of politician in the Dáil, followed by Holly Cairns of the Social Democrats on 40%. Nobody else breaks 40% in terms of the public thinking them, in effect, a decent skin.
These numbers are historically low. For context, here are the party leader satisfaction ratings from an Irish Times poll in 2002:
Bertie Ahern’s own rating, however, has gone up by four points to 68. Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams has a 56pc rating, two ahead of Mary Harney, who dropped by five points to 54pc. Ruairi Quinn has the approval of 41pc, while the Green’s new leader, Trevor Sargent, has a 35pc rating.
Think about that: On a bad day for her, Mary Harney was 12 points more popular in 2002 than any Irish party leader is today. And Mary Harney, it is fair to say, was not a beloved politician.
This is a Government – and in fact an entire political class – with very low levels of respect and admiration from the public by historical standards. They are not well positioned to face into the headwinds of the year to come, either on immigration, or frankly on any other issue.