“And what you’re calling for, effectively, is a cap on immigration and a cap on asylum into this country. Let’s be clear. I’m calling it. That’s what you’re calling for. We will not support that”.
Those words above were spoken – no, not spoken, roared – across the Dáil chamber by Darragh O’Brien TD, the Minister for Housing, on June 21st, less than three weeks ago. They were roared at Carol Nolan TD, who’d had the temerity to ask the Government whether it had carried out any impact assessments on the number of refugees, Ukrainian and otherwise, arriving into the country.
By even asking the question, the Minister asserted, Deputy Nolan was “undermining social cohesion”, which is polite Politician speak for “stoking up racism”.
Here is that same Minister, standing, with no apparent shame or embarrassment, beside his Taoiseach this morning:
A ‘tented village’-style accommodation at Gormanstown army camp will open on Monday
— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) July 14, 2022
At @fiannafailparty pp:
Taoiseach @MichealMartinTD says there is a concern that some refugees arriving here are not from Ukraine.
He is convening a meeting of ministers tomorrow to discuss accommodation crisis for refugees.— Daniel McConnell (@McConnellDaniel) July 13, 2022
In three weeks then, the Government has gone from “we will never set a cap” to “immigration is too high, some of these people aren’t even Ukrainian, and of course, it’s Britain’s fault”.
The poor Irish people. Victims of British perfidity once again.
It must, after all, be the British. It is always the British. It is never Irish incompetence.
It could not be, for example, that Ireland announced that it would give every asylum seeker own door accommodation within four months – and then advertised this fact internationally in multiple languages.
It could not be, for example, that they declared in public that anybody could come, and everyone would be welcomed.
It could not be that, for example, they have persistently shut down debate on this subject and denounced anybody who said that the state’s capacity has limits as some kind of latter-day Mussolini.
And so, here we are, announcing a “tented village” in Gormanstown as an emergency measure. An emergency measure needed because nobody in our Government saw this problem coming.
It is incompetence of the highest degree. It is Government by the cast of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. And of course, it is cost free incompetence. The opposition are in no place to lecture: They supported this venture every step of the way, and criticised only that the Government were slow-walking the process. If the opposition had had their way, this crisis would have come in May, not July.
Perhaps this is what the public want. Perhaps the country is, in its own perverse way, sort of addicted to misery. No doubt there will be otherwise sensible, true blue Fine Gaelers up and down the country who sincerely believe that all of this was necessary and “doing our duty” but that poor Ireland was, once again, scuppered by the dastardly British and their Rwanda plan shifting even more migrants towards us. That will, of course, be a cost-free opinion. The kind of thing one can say on RTE while presenters nod sagely, and other guests stroke their chin in thoughtful consideration. But it’s bollocks.
In the first instance, Britain has every right to its own migrant policy, and nothing in that policy requires Ireland to accept everybody that Britain turns away or discourages. We are free to do some discouragement of our own.
In the second instance, this has always been a basic question of mathematics. Housing is not a fixed asset, but it is an inelastic one: You can’t just magick homes out of nowhere in a matter of months. When you agree to give an unlimited number of people beds, and you do not have unlimited beds, a problem will emerge as a matter of certainty, because you will always arrive at a point when the beds run out.
A two-year-old could understand this, and that is not an exaggeration.
A competent Government might, on the outbreak of the war, done an audit of the country’s housing stock and other available accommodation and worked out the number of feasibly useable beds. It might then have come up with a number – five or ten or fifteen thousand or whatever it was – and announced that it could and would accommodate that many people.
It might then have immediately begun the work of matching and prioritizing this accommodation to people’s needs: Places close to schools for families, hotel rooms for single people, and so on. It might have attempted to mobilise civil society to provide welcomes and integration and support.
But the Irish Government did none of this. It simply flung open the doors, and then asked for plaudits on the basis of its compassion.
And now they’re out at Dublin Castle, saying things that just three weeks ago they were denouncing as racist.
All of this is a consequence of the Government’s own monumental, barely credible, incompetence.
A word here, by the way, for our media: You might think that a humiliating reversal in tone and policy such as that announced yesterday might have resulted in a few basic questions being asked of our politicians, such as “Taoiseach, in hindsight, was it a mistake to put no limits on the number of people we said we would take” or “Minister, in hindsight, doesn’t your remark to Carol Nolan a few weeks ago now look a bit silly?”
Or perhaps even “Does Carol Nolan deserve an apology?”
I’ll leave it for you, dear reader, to decide whether those questions were asked by my colleagues in the Irish press corps.
I think the public deserves better. From politics and media alike.