The use of the term “non-national” is now “absolutely unacceptable” and “inappropriate” and will lead to elected representatives calling you a “disgusting person”. This may be news to you – it certainly was to me.
Given that you are most likely a reasonable person, you may also likely have presumed that a factual description such as “non-national” could not be dragged into the category of Hurty Words that are to be avoided for fear of cancellation or disapproval from the political class.
But then again, the unwritten law forbidding Hurty Words has no discernable logic, and is used primarily to shut down discourse, especially debate around the sacred cows of the liberal left, chief of which is immigration.
Some context: National Party Councillor Patrick Quinlan was speaking at the 12th January meeting of Fingal County Council and made the point that the growth in population referred to in a Fingal County Council report on housing was being driven by the surge in the number of non-nationals entering the country – adding that he believed the report was a smokescreen around this reality.
He said that, given Ireland’s cratering fertility rate, immigration was leading to housing pressures – and that the failure to acknowledge this primary cause had then lead to a push for rezoning which contradicted the 2023-2029 Development Plan.
His claim, predictably, led to the usual denials: as if importing over million people to the point where a quarter of all people living in Ireland were not born here, had no impact at all on housing or services or healthcare.
It is the stuff of fairytales: a tale spun by the deluded or the deceitful, even as the Irish people can see with their own eyes the horrendous effect that immigration has had on the competition for already scarce housing, and rental, and everything else impacted when the stubborn laws of supply and demand come up against a huge population surge driven far above natural population growth by immigration.
Members of Fingal County Council were not happy, and called on Cllr Quinlan to withdraw the use of his supposedly disgraceful language, specifically the use of the term “non-national”.
Cllr John-Kingley Onwumereh of Fianna Fáil was utterly indignant. Everyone speaking in the Council chamber needed to be “mindful” of the “sensitivities” of the issues under discussion, he said, and Cllr Quinlan needed to realise the term “non-nationals” was “absolutely unacceptable”. He further declared that it “long been agreed that it was inappropriate” to use the phrase.
Agreed by whom, exactly? Cllr Onwumereh didn’t say, but then called on the Mayor to ask Cllr Quinlan to “withdraw that language” which he took “serious exception” to – and to withdraw it “right now”.
Cllr Quinlan responded by pointing out that the term non-Irish-national was used by the Central Statistics Office and that the objectors could take the matter up with that and similar bodies.
He was then accused of proving himself a “racist” and a “disgusting person” by left-wing councillor Dean Mulligan, whose infantile contribution tells us far more about common abuse in politics than the use of the widely-used term “non-national”
It all seemed rather farcical and unserious, but in fact the councillors’ desire to control language around immigration matters should be recognised as an insidious attempt at censorship, especially given the prior attempts in Fingal and other local authorities in Dublin to seek to shut down debate around this issue. Some of these councillors are so ideology-addled that they don’t understand just how Orwellian their behaviour is, but many others are fully aware of the fundamental truth that whoever controls the use of language also controls the narrative.
Politicians who seek to proscribe language – and compel the use of the approved words and phrases that best suits their narrative – understand the power of trampling down on free speech. It is not simply in pursuit of some daft woke agenda that terms such as ‘non-national’ are to be forbidden: it is in the service of stamping out opposition to a particular political position – of suppressing speech in order to suppress debate, of ensuring political conformity.
Orwell wrote of the need to identify language and speech designed to produce that political conformity, adding “in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible”. Now, the political establishment has moved on to a position where any criticism of the indefensible can be attacked as hate-speech. So, the Irish political establishment has adopted the indefensible position of ignoring the huge opposition to continued mass immigration and then, in in order to defend the indefensible, they want to curtail the right to even discuss the problem.
As Independent Ireland councillor, Linda de Courcy, pointed out on X, it’s easy to mock the ridiculous behaviour in the Fingal County Council chamber as the “scourge of hurty words” – but it matters who you vote for because it certainly seems that only a handful of councillors across Dublin represent the majority of Irish people who have repeatedly told pollsters that they want immigration restricted.
Does it matter whether the deluded councillors of Fingal (or most of them at any rate, it seems) want to suppress the use of words they don’t like? Yes, because we have previously seen that Dublin City Council used the same tactics when Independent Councillors, Malachy Steenson and Gavin Pepper sought to have an honest discussion on migrant crime in the wake of stabbings carried out in the Stoneybatter/Aughrim Street area of the north city. The suspect arrested in that case appeared to be a Brazilian national who had come to the attention of the Gardaí previously.
And Fingal Country Council also previously moved to block Cllr Quinlan from providing the people of the area with some basic information regarding housing. His question, as we reported previously, was a simple one: Of the people currently awaiting housing from Fingal County Council, how many of them are foreign nationals?
The data, as was pointed out, had previously been released in 2011 to Fine Gael councillor Kieran Dennison and at that time showed that 51% of applicants for housing were foreign nationals. Cllr Quinlan wanted to know what that percentage was today. The council voted against releasing those updated figures in December 2024, by a vote of 29 to 1.
(It’s worth noting that information on housing and foreign nationals has to be dragged from the various bodies by inches, if at all, but Matt Treacy of this parish recently found that 7,282 heads of households on DePaul housing lists had been in the asylum system.
Claiming words are unacceptable and forbidden have purpose, then. And there’s a certain creeping authoritarianism in local politicians seeking to stamp down on free speech and on legitimate inquiry on as issue as all-important as immigration. These actions are designed to keep information from the electorate however much it might be dressed up as disdain for the National Party.