Last Monday Night, Fianna Fáil MEP Barry Andrews appeared on Virgin Media’s Tonight Show to discuss the issue of immigration. Andrews, like most good election candidates, was relentlessly on message: His party has something to sell, and by god he was going to sell it. Listen to this clip of him interrupting Aontu’s Peadar Toibin, at about 25 seconds in:
"They have just woken up to the fact that there's an issue. Anybody who raised this as an issue more than 12 months ago were told they were a threat to cohesion…"@Toibin1 says the Government have just woken up to the immigration issue.#TonightVMTV pic.twitter.com/ytxl7fdLF8
— TonightVMTV (@TonightVMTV) April 29, 2024
“That’s why we need the migration and asylum pact”, says Andrews, “as an EU-wide framework for resolving these issues”. The “issue” in question was Toibin’s entirely correct statement of fact: that 85% of those issued with a deportation order in the past five years were never deported.
The issue with his argument, lest it need spelling out, is obvious: Ireland’s failure to enforce legally issued deportation orders is not an EU problem, and nor can it be “addressed” by any EU legislation, including the immigration and asylum pact. EU law did not prevent us deporting people (as evidenced quite clearly by the fact that 15% were deported) and a new EU law is not going to fix the administrative or ideological bottlenecks that caused the mass failure to deport those who were issued with such orders.
Andrews is not alone in offering bizarre justifications for the Asylum pact. Here’s Justice Minister Helen McEntee, as quoted by the Irish Times yesterday:
“Ms McEntee said the current migration system is not working because the law governing it was enacted when there were 3,500 international protection applicants a year, compared to 13,000 people last year. “So it’s not realistic to present this as an issue which would simply disappear if we chose not to engage with it or indeed not to opt into the pact.”
This, again, is patent and obvious and absolute nonsense: First, the claim that the system is not working because the numbers coming through the system have increased is highly questionable. If 85% of those being issued with deportation orders are not deported, that is by definition not a problem with the legislation or the design of our immigration system: It is a problem of management and functionality. The tools to deport people exist, it is just that the Government has failed to use them in the majority of cases.
It is the second part of her statement, however, that is more egregious: Essentially, she says, it is the migration pact or bust: If we don’t sign up to it, we’re stuck with our old, broken (she says) system in perpetuity. That is, and forgive me if I use a coarse word for emphasis, bollocks.
It is also in keeping with a regular tactic of this particular Government. I’d encourage people here to cast their minds back to the recent referendum on care, during which the Government repeatedly tried to argue that a “yes” vote would result in better treatment of carers and the Government doing more for those who care for sick relatives or neighbours. Opponents pointed out, entirely correctly, that there is absolutely nothing in existing Irish law – constitutional or otherwise – that prevents Government from doing more for carers today.
The same is true of immigration. We do not need, in Ireland, the permission of the EU to adopt a stricter or more efficient migration system. Indeed, inside the EU, many countries have done so already. In the extreme case, Hungary actually built a border fence to keep most migrants out. In the less extreme cases, Denmark and Germany have explored – like the UK – deals with Rwanda to take migrants. Denmark has three dedicated detention facilities where migrants are detained, and not granted their freedom, pending the outcome of their processing. There is nothing in EU law that prevents any of this.
What the Government is doing, of course, is what the Government specialises in: A sales job to low information voters. In this, it is being largely facilitated by the media, whose speciality is co-operating with the Government on sales pitches to low-information voters. The Irish Times and its reporters are just as aware as I am that Minister McEntee’s claims about the migration pact are nonsensical, but are more willing than I am to report them without any associated commentary while hiding behind the idea that it’s their duty to simply highlight what she’s saying.
None of this is to say that there is no merit whatsoever to the migration pact, or no valid arguments for joining it: The Government makes a fair case that since migration is an international issue, and many Governments are facing similar challenges, a partnership approach is better than going alone. One might agree or disagree with that, but it’s not an unfair argument.
What is unfair – and unfair is an insufficiently strong word – is what we’re seeing from the Government on this issue in terms of pretending that the migration pact, which was unheard of months ago, is suddenly the only solution possible to a problem that Government pretended didn’t exist until five minutes ago. If the very neatness of that development doesn’t make your ears prick up with skepticism, then you probably shouldn’t be trusted with a vote to start with.
Government has many options to deal with migration. The problem is that for whatever reason, it finds many such options just entirely unpalatable. Up until two weeks ago, for example, Ireland would piously have insisted that sending people to Rwanda was barbaric. Now, suddenly, we’re happy to send people back to the UK in the knowledge that they may well be sent from there to Rwanda. The barbaric, in just a few weeks, has turned into a po-faced insistence that we’re simply imposing existing agreements on the truculent British.
Democracies only work if voters uphold their end of the bargain. Governments are always going to lie, and spin, and twist reality in order to attempt to fool voters into accepting that the Government is more competent and responsible than it actually is. Voters, in a democracy, have a duty to themselves and their fellow citizens to be deeply skeptical. Even more so when most of the media – whose tradtional job it was to be skeptical – have instead embraced the Government’s message as their own.
In Ireland, it is clear, politicians don’t have a high opinion of voters’ willingness to do that. That, and only that, explains how they think they can get away with some of the utter nonsense that they are spouting in relation to the migration pact. On this issue, the Government parties are treating the public as if they are fools. It is up to the public to decide whether those who rule them are correct in their estimation of public intelligence.