One of the things about commentary, and journalism, is that it should ideally be measured. An ordinary person, for example, might look at an Irish Government that has suddenly realised that it has no room in the country for the number of asylum seekers it has welcomed, and describe the politicians responsible as dumb, stupid, so-and-sos, or words to that effect. Those of us who write about politicians for a living, though, are cursed with having to come up with alternative explanations for the messes in which they so often find themselves. It’s not sufficient simply to write that they are stupid – there must be some kind of policy or cultural explanation for their conduct. We’re supposed to give you the rational explanations for the irrational things that they do.
This week, though, try though I might, that simply isn’t possible. The only explanation – the only one that fits – is sheer, unprecedented, stupidity.
Over the last number of years, I have described on these pages the immigration issue as being one of simple mathematics. You have ten houses, that means you can accommodate ten families. If you try to accommodate one hundred families in ten houses, you will have a housing crisis.
In the case of a whole country, it is broader than that. Consider the question of why it is that every decade, Ireland, like most countries, conducts a census.
It is not, as some might imagine, simply so your future descendants can trace their ancestors through census records. It is, in fact, so that the state can look at the data, see the number of people in their 50s, and calculate what the pensions bill will be in a decade. It is so they can see the number of babies, and calculate the number of school places they will need in five years. It is so they can profile the population, and match the service provision – schools, roads, hospitals, gardai – to what the figures tell them the population will be.
As a result, it is more than simply our housing stock that is built around population projections. And when there is a sudden and enormous influx of people into a country, it is therefore a guarantee that the infrastructure of that country – which was not built to take a sudden surge in immigration into a country into account – will creak. “Ireland is full” never had anything to do with land, or population density. It always had everything to do with the capacity of the state.
But there’s more to it than just that. The modern welfare state is based on a simple proposition: Solidarity.
You work to pay for others who cannot work, or who have worked and are now too old to do the same. You pay taxes to support those in need, and when the time comes that you are in need, others will work to pay for you. That is the basic proposition underpinning everything from social housing to pensions to free education.
But the case for the welfare state is fundamentally undermined by rapid immigration, because the deal has changed right in front of the eyes of voters. It goes from a system of defined obligations and benefits to one of unlimited obligations and defined benefits. The argument has effectively become one that says that Irish people have an obligation to support almost anyone who wishes to come here, to house almost anyone who wishes to come here, and to grant asylum to almost anyone who wishes to come here. It has become a global benefits system, paid for by locals.
Politicians were warned about this in advance. My colleague Ben Scallan likes to say that the difference between the far right in Ireland, and Government policy, is about six months. In the case of immigration, it’s taken longer than that. About eighteen months, to be precise.
What does it say about our political class that ordinary people in the East Wall, and in rural villages up and down the country, could recognise the unfolding crisis when the leaders of the country could not? And what does it say about our politicians that they indulged the labelling of their own citizens as racist and extremist for saying the very things that they themselves now admit to be true? There’s no policy or cultural explanation for that. It can only really be explained by the conclusion that the people running the country are just a bit dim. After all, it’s not as if they weren’t told: Watch Carol Nolan here, saying 18 months ago what the Government only managed to realise this week:
https://twitter.com/Mullins77David/status/1717476508657189230
But more than that, what does it say about a media that will accept “Ireland is full” from a Government politician, but dismiss that same sentiment from an ordinary citizen? When ordinary citizens were saying the very things our Government is saying now, journalists felt obliged to challenge them. To ask, for example, if they were motivated by bigotry, rather than a cold-eyed analysis of the human rights laws to which Ireland is a subscriber? Where are those journalists now, asking our Ministers if they are motivated by bigotry?
The most persistent quality of the Irish establishment appears to be its belief in its own moral superiorty: Over the British, over the Americans, certainly over the hated Israelis, and generally over its own citizens. That is nowhere more clearly expressed than it is on immigration. When the view that Ireland was full was opposed by the Government, it became a morally inferior view. But when it is embraced by that same Government, it becomes a pragmatic, morally neutral view. And thus the tone of our leaders, and our media, changes to fit the new moral reality. It would be shameless, if one thought that it was conscious, rather than the result of the people running the country just being a little bit slower, mentally, than people who can do maths.
My grandmother used to say, of people she found incompetent, that if they had brains, they would be dangerous. But when it comes to this issue, and the people running Ireland, I’m not sure that’s true. If they had brains, we wouldn’t constantly end up in these obvious, and entirely predictable, messes.