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According to our friends at the Journal, who got their information from Waterways Ireland, the Irish state is now spending €30,000 of your money every week to maintain fencing along the Grand Canal in Dublin for the purpose of preventing migrants and other homeless people from building tent cities.
This amounts to about €1.5m per year.
Ahead of the local and European elections, the new Taoiseach, Simon Harris, set about setting a new tone on immigration, politically. Perhaps the centrepiece of that new tone was the clearing of migrant tent camps on Mount Street and the Grand Canal, which was accompanied by appropriately stern language from our newly installed leader: Such encampments, he said, would not be tolerated and those who lived in them would be moved on. Several major security operations, well flagged to the media, saw tents dismantled and their occupants unceremoniously rounded up and dispatched to much less visible encampments in the safety of the Wicklow Mountains.
The fencing is to ensure that they don’t come back.
The problem, of course, is that as a short-term temporary measure, this kind of firm hand approach might be sustainable. But as we saw last week, with left wing activists trying to dismantle the fencing, it is not a long-term solution. The purpose of the Government’s approach was to reclaim public amenities for the public and win votes in the process. The outcome, on the other hand, has been to permanently disfigure public amenities and build a monument to the Government’s dysfunctional immigration policy in the process.
I do not know how many people drive or walk past the fencing on the Grand Canal every day, but logic would dictate that it is at the very least in the high tens of thousands. In the first days when that fencing was erected, one of the benefits for the Government is that the fencing served as a monument to their decisiveness and willingness to act. The flip side of that is that the longer the fencing stays in place, the more the fencing becomes a daily monument to the immigration crisis, keeping it front and centre in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of people who pass it weekly.
What’s more, as the Journal story demonstrates, the weekly cost of depriving the people of Dublin of one of their amenities is likely to become a running political sore. €1.5m per year is next to nothing in the context of the national budget, but it’s exactly the kind of sum of money that sticks in the public mind and reinforces the problem I mention above: Every time you see them, as a voter, you think “thirty thousand euros a week”.
In isolation, this might not be a major issue. Yet when it is combined with the scenes in Coolock, and the likely flashpoint in Dundrum in Tipperary, and the fully thirty other sites which have been identified but not yet announced, the reminder becomes more stark. And the Government is trapped: Having put up the fencing, they cannot take it down. If the tent cities were to suddenly re-appear ahead of the General Election, then that would represent a bigger problem than keeping the fencing in place.
These are amongst the reasons why immigration is becoming an intractable issue for the Government, but they also point to a fundamental weakness in the Simon Harris act: He is very good at big gestures and setting a tone – but his career is very light on actually solving problems. He can buy time – as demonstrated by broken but eye-catching promises on things like Scoliosis and the Universal Social Charge – but sounding like a man of action only gets you so far. Fine Gael’s bet – and Harris’s – has been that the action-man act would get them through to the next General Election. Yet it seems more and more likely that Fianna Fáil will block that election until next spring, making the Government endure another winter of immigration discontent.
Fine Gael may find that this is a recurring problem with Harris: He is perhaps the most gifted communicator ever to hold the office of Taoiseach, but that communications ability has never been convincingly matched with a record of successfully governing. Ultimately, the problem for great communicators might be named after one of the greatest to do it in recent times: Tony Blair. It doesn’t matter a jot if you’re one of the great political communicators if people ultimately lose faith in your judgment.
For Harris, the fencing along the canals runs a real risk of becoming a real electoral monument to his lack of judgment. For his opponents, it will become something to point to.
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