The policy pursued by the government and sundry NGOs of housing large groups of migrants within small communities without warning, first met with local opposition in East Wall over a year and a half ago.
The protestors focused on local action and typically listed amongst their objections that there was not sufficient services in the area, and that they felt unsafe with the sudden arrival of large groups of young men in their community who had nothing to do all day.
The term “unvetted males” thern became part of the dicourse on the ground – a description which was (and still is) accurate but which was sharply criticized by the establishment who have been on damage control since.
I attended protests in Ballymun and East Wall where I found locals who understood that the influx of new arrivals – paid for by the government – was putting upward pressure on rents and property prices. Some of the people expressing these concerns were Eastern Europeans who were working and paying taxes in Ireland and who didn’t feel their tax Euros should be used to push up the price of their rents. They said they were being force to pay the price as the government bid against them in the housing and rental market.
Another woman, a committed liberal all her life, put it plainly that the overall trend was making housing unaffordable for her children.
The press and the establishment were quick to create a story that these protests were not run by locals but by “far right” provocateurs who weren’t even from the area. An astro-turfed government-sponsored campaign of ‘local heroes’ sought high and low for big voices in the community to fight back. They found a few in Ballymun to sign some sort of letter against racism, but they were nearly all people employed by the establishment – an astro-turf campaign which was transparently a shell group of local party politicians and NGO and government-funded employees.
In Ballymun, I met a protestor from the distant shores of Santry who said she was frightened to walk in Santry park, which had suddenly become filled with groups of young men who seemed to have nothing to do all day except look threatening. Liviing n Santry, the media spinners might have you believe, makes you “not local” to Ballymun.
But is this even relevant? Does the media or the far-left have a right to tell Irish people they have no right to take part in the political life of their own country? I submit they do not, and the argument they make is both hypocritical and anti-democratic. But more significantly, it is a strategy of divide and isolate which protestors should reject.
When a make-shift migrant camp city was established in Pearse Street in May last year, the media and the revolutionary pinkos of antifa and PBP were quick to condemn the Pearse Street locals and more significantly, “far right protest tourists”.
Remember who PBP are. They’re the bread-line socialists who wanted to nationalize the supermarkets. How this cringe, fringe, motley group of (mostly middle-class and often privately-schooled) individuals would pay to house migrants when there are food shortages is beyond me, but still, they are deemed useful idiots by Ireland’s elite who use them against locally rooted movements.
But an interesting statement was made by a PBP member on RTE’s Upfront with Katie Hannon on this issue. Trying to delegitimise the protests as not locally organized, he complained that at every one of these protests he went to he saw the same people. There is an element attending that is not local he asserted. But this is not a smoking gun, far from it.
To make an obvious point, doesn’t this also mean that he – and likely other PBP members – is also touring these sites as an agitator? What business does he have in these local matters?
Was this a lack of self awareness, or was it something else?
There an implicit assumption in this statement that the left has the moral high ground and the locals are just stupid and misguided. They can travel the country spreading the good news because they believe they, and only they, are on “the right side of history”. There’s that old Marxist thought terminating cliché designed to get you to accept their terms of engagement. It is a very effective strategy if you can get your opponents to accept it.
If the establishment can keep these protest groups around the country isolated, they can’t learn from each other. Lacking experience and counsel, they will continue to get caught in the same rhetorical traps around the country; of defensively refuting the same ridiculous charges of the media and their leftist allies. In truth, they have every right to learn from each other.
For instance, the local leaders who coordinated the protests in East Wall had a list of suitable available properties in D4 that would have been much more suitable for the migrants that were billeted in East Wall. They kept on broadcasting that D4, the epicenter of pro-migrant virtue signalers, could accommodate these migrants much better than East Wall could. As can be imagined, the people of D4 have the same attitude to migrants as the people of America’s most expensive neighborhood, Martha’s Vineyard do – fine for cleaning the McMansion but not for living close by.
Also in the USA, Texas started sending the migrants that New York liberals claim to care so much for, to New York. New York is now complaining they have an emergency and are trying to sue Texas and the bus companies who brought the migrants.
(Why is New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, doing this? Surely as a ‘sanctuary city’ this should be his dearest desire?)
The point regarding protest in Ireland is that as communities under pressure learn what tactics work and which ones don’t, they should be learning from each other. And why shouldn’t they support each other? They live in the same country.
The media have created a narrative that some protestors feel they need to react to, but its a side issue, and immigration is a national issue as well as a local one. Accepting the terms of the establishment in any debate is a barrier to a coordinated and informed strategy to counter the integrated strategy of the globalist elite and the left.
Polls have now repeatedly show that a large majority of Irish people feel the country is taking in too many migrants and asylum seekers. Those people have a right to work together and set out their own terms and not be cornered by the insistence of the media that only prescribed concerns can be aired.
The government knows is that this is not a series of local issues; it’s a national issue. Local protestors, whether they realize it or not, are speaking to a national audience about a national issue. They should not let themselves be cornered by the media narrative, or spend their time backing away from ridiculous accusations of racism when they have every right to speak up against the folly of what the government’s policies on immigration.