When I was a teenager at school, my childhood friend and I had a running joke, where we would imagine comically over-the-top situations of being ordered at gunpoint to do something absurd and impossible.
For example, we’d imagine being held at gunpoint by a psychopath who’s screaming at you to solve the Tunisian economic crisis right now, and when you said “OK, OK, but I just need a little bit of time to come up with a plan,” he starts counting down from ten while aiming the gun directly at your head. In other words, you’re finished.
But as funny as that concept was, it turns out that what started as a ridiculous joke – being threatened unless you complete a totally unreasonable and unrealistic request – is now the Irish government’s reality. And it’s a reality of their own making.
As reported by RTÉ this morning, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) is now preparing to sue the government for failing to provide accommodation for hundreds of asylum seekers:
Currently, there are 259 asylum applicants homeless in Ireland, although many more than that have been homeless at some stage after coming here. This, IHREC argues, is a violation of their fundamental rights. Should this case be argued successfully, that could open the floodgates and allow large numbers of homeless asylum applicants to sue the Irish State.
At this point it’s also probably worth pointing out that IHREC is a state-funded body in receipt of about €7.6m annually as of last year. This means that the State is effectively funding a legal challenge against itself using taxpayers’ money, and if that challenge is successful, the taxpayers will have to pay out again for the government’s failures. Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is tremendously encouraging for those of us who work and pay tax in this country. It’s great to know my money is going towards branches of the State suing each other, and no matter who wins, I lose.
But really, that’s neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is, the government has quite clearly done everything physically possible to accommodate as many refugees as they can. They have crammed asylum seekers into every possible square centimetre of this island, leading to nation-wide social chaos and significant backlash, and they’re still nowhere close to finished, citing “international obligations” to this very day.
When it comes to Ireland's immigration debate, politicians have a new favourite talking point: "international obligations." #gript pic.twitter.com/6hGl1KhBfy
— gript (@griptmedia) June 14, 2023
So it’s clearly not a lack of political will that is seeing these asylum seekers go without accommodation. This government has the same level of will and commitment to mass immigration as a Kamikaze pilot does to crashing his plane, or a jihadist suicide bomber does to blowing himself up. They appear willing to do literally anything, up to and including detonating their own electoral chances, to make sure as many asylum seekers are housed on this small island as possible. So if there are still migrants going homeless, clearly, there is simply nowhere left to put them – it is genuinely impossible from a practical and legal perspective.
And yet, the State is being taken to court because it has pledged to do the impossible. Apparently, if you can’t bend the laws of physics to manifest more accommodation out of thin air like Green Lantern, that failure warrants you being taken to court. I suppose next we’ll be seeing Leo Varadkar getting sued because he can’t levitate or shoot laser beams from his eyes.
But we shouldn’t feel bad for the politicians either in this – they’re the ones who committed to doing something that was obviously impossible, and then repeatedly doubled down on the decision. They did it to themselves.
After all, in December 2022, the government committed to a referendum on inserting a “Right To Housing” into the constitution in the Programme for Government, which would produce an even worse version of the same problem.
We are calling for the right to housing to be included in the Constitution. As a party, the right to own your own home is a core belief. But we need to go further. It's about the State making a commitment to ensure that every citizen has access to a secure & affordable home. pic.twitter.com/KJTiKQd0zQ
— Fianna Fáil (@fiannafailparty) June 4, 2021
The reason houses are unaffordable in Ireland, in very basic terms, is because of market forces such as supply and demand – there are lots of people who want housing, and not enough houses available, thus resulting in a huge spike in the price. That may be a very simplified explanation of the problem, but it is essentially an economics 101 description.
So pledging a legal “Right To Housing,” as nice as that sounds in theory, does not practically solve anything. Not one single house would be produced by such a policy. It’s easy to say “People are entitled to XYZ,” but it’s not so easy to provide XYZ for them. Simply declaring an entitlement does nothing to actually fix the problem.
It’s a bit like changing your medical records to say that you’re 6ft 4, when you’re actually 5ft 6 – you can write whatever you want on paper, but it doesn’t change the underlying facts of the situation or advance your position in any tangible way.
This is exactly the situation the government is in with refugees – they have committed to all of these “international obligations,” pledging housing to an unlimited number of asylum seekers, but they don’t have an unlimited amount of accommodation. And now they’re getting challenged in court for it.
The lack of joined-up thinking among our political leaders on these issues is simply a stunning sight to behold.