The sign in the photo above is a very crude and blunt message. “Are you concerned” it asks, about 100 men moving in “here”.
The key word, though, on the sign is “here”. The “here” in question is a former amusements facility and one time discount store in Finglas, once full of coin games and 1980’s style arcade machines, and now full of hastily thrown together beds which will accommodate up to 100 refugees or asylum applicants. On saturday, there was a protest about it.
Whatever one’s view on immigration, perhaps a good place to start would be this: If the state is resorting to putting migrants in camp beds inside former amusements facilities, then those tweeting #Irelandisfull are simply stating the plain truth.
What’s more, perhaps we could set aside our views on immigration, for one moment, and look at this from the perspective of those protesting: That some of the people who attend these protests are anti-immigration activists who’d travel the country to attend any protest about immigration is true, but it is also true that many of the people who attend such events are local people who are genuinely baffled by the actions of the state.
Former amusement facilities are, by definition, commercially zoned. It might be expected, in the normal course of events, that when a business closes or moves out, the local authorities might be eager to get a new business into the facility. This is the process of urban regeneration on which communities depend: Commercial facilities provide services, and employment, and opportunities, and fuel the lives of communities. They were not built as housing. They are not designed to accommodate people, even on a temporary basis – and in Ireland, as we know, there is nothing so permanent as temporary accommodation.
So, neither is it unreasonable for locals to wonder about the wisdom of housing 100 young men in such conditions. It effectively amounts to putting people into a warehouse, with shared sanitation facilities which are unlikely to have been designed for the purpose. They will have no jobs. They will have nothing to do for recreation. They are very unlikely to have much money. Because it is temporary accommodation, those who move there will have no attachment to the local community, nor any incentive to build one. You do not have to be a genius to see that such a situation is a recipe for loitering and anti-social behaviour.
Why are we doing this, as a country? What benefit does Ireland accrue from it? And even if you argue that we accrue no benefit other than doing “the right thing”, that begs the question as to how on earth it can be considered “the right thing” to toss 100 people into a disused amusement arcade and call it “accommodation”. This by the way, is one area where the full-time anti-immigrant activists are just plain wrong: You can say “house the Irish first” all you like, but nobody would ever, in a million years, consider tossing 100 homeless Irish people into a building like this. Refugees and asylum applicants can’t vote, and don’t have families who can vote, and in many cases cannot speak English, so it’s permissible and practical, apparently, to treat them like cattle.
Ireland’s immigration policy changed, at some point this year, from being simply “very liberal” to what it is now: utter madness.
We are importing people into this country at the rate of thousands per week. The Ukrainian crisis is one thing, but every single indicator of migrant numbers indicates a huge surge from other countries as well. These people have all been promised, by Government policy, their own house. But we cannot possibly keep that promise and are therefore tossing people in amusement arcades instead. Criticising this, as several TDs and Senators have discovered, gets you labelled a racist by the clowns who consider themselves the establishment in this country. The Government is now conducting a frantic search around Ireland for any and all facilities, no matter what their original purpose, which can now be converted into places with roofs that will hold beds. Calling these places “housing” is an abomination, because many of them are not fit for purpose.
The Gardai cannot possibly vet all these people, or ensure that they pose no threat to the community. It is a regrettable statement of fact that in too many of Ireland’s high profile murders this year, including crimes of misogyny and homophobia, the persons facing murder charges are migrants. It is true too that many of those involved in organizing the sex trade, as well as the majority of those victimized by it, are migrants. In almost every town that has been repurposed into a welcoming centre, there have been complaints by local women of sexually aggressive behaviour by young migrant men. These are not things we are supposed to say: In modern Ireland, even statements of fact can be dismissed as racist. Shutting up about them is the non-racist thing to do.
If we had a functioning political left in this country, one that actually cared about the working people and deprived people that it pretends to represent, Saturday’s protest would have been much bigger. It is an absolute disgrace to our nation that the political discourse at the moment seems to think it is compassionate and noble to toss people in a derelict building and call it housing, and then proceed to label those who object, or correctly point out that the newcomers are being left with very few options aside from crime and antisocial behaviour, as racist.
But we do not have a functioning left. We do not have a functioning media. We do not, in 2022, appear to have a functioning anything. The country is being run into the ground.