I confess that I often wonder why the public takes it.
Whatever about the legitimacy or otherwise of a debate on immigration, or whatever your views on the subject of immigration, the Irish national broadcaster is always and forever insistent that the debate should not be honest.
Here’s an example: During the leaders debate the other night, host Katie Hannon interjected at the beginning of the very brief segment on migration to tell us something that we all know. But of course, she said, many people who come here to make a better life do important things for the country. Think of all the doctors and engineers, and so on.
Now, dear reader, I am sure that somewhere out there exists a tattooed skinhead who’d happily deport all doctors and engineers of less than sufficiently pale skin, and would trade their skills for a racially pure society. But that is not how any ordinary, half normal person in Ireland relates to this debate.
During said debate, Cian O’Callaghan of the Social Democrats and Ivana Bacik of Labour trotted out another favourite line – that Ireland needs migration to address our “skills shortages”.
This is of course insulting, infantilising, nonsense.
First, hardly anybody objects to adding skilled workers to our economy, even though doing so is arguably immoral. Stealing doctors nurses and engineers from poor third world countries that have paid to educate those people isn’t something to be proud of, even if most people can live with it.
Second, nobody looks at the massive encampments for 1,000 or more people being constructed in Clonmel and north Dublin, amongst other places, and thinks those encampments have anything to do with addressing our “skills shortages”. Those facilities are not full of skilled workers. They are full of people who have come here mostly in the hope of picking up unskilled work. There’s nothing wrong with that desire on their behalf but Ireland already has 150,000 people of its own on the live register, who should probably be encouraged to work first.
Third, if we want to address “skills shortages” then the least these people could do is put some numbers on it. I mean, they essentially want to centrally plan the economy in every other respect – they can tell you to the number how many houses we need to build, how many school places we will need, how much pensions will have to increase by – but ask a single one of them how many surgeons we will need to import or how many nurses we need to hire from abroad and you’ll get blank stares. If this was about addressing a skills shortage, they should be able to tell us what skills we are short of, and how many people we need to fill them. But they cannot.
Indeed, the whole thing is just a mindless mantra, more like a prayer than a policy. “We need immigration” is a position so obvious and so almost universally accepted that re-stating it is not actually about advocating a policy so much as it is about advocating against thought. Just accept it, that’s the message.
But none of this is how ordinary voters think.
Most of us are perfectly capable of distinguishing between good and necessary immigration, and the kinds of migration that are deleterious for our economy and social cohesion. We’re also perfectly and instinctively capable of seeing the difference in “value add” between an Indian surgeon who specialises in curing eye diseases in children, and a Georgian unskilled worker who has heard that the immigration system here is friendly. Those two people are not the same, nor does the average voter desire for them to be treated the same.
Finally, we are under no moral obligation to treat them the same. Georgia, per our own Government, is a “safe country”. What does this mean? This is what the Irish Government says:
“This means it can be shown that there is generally no persecution, no torture or inhuman or degrading treatment, or no threat of violence from an armed conflict in that country.”
That, I repeat, is not my assessment. It’s the assessment of the very people running our migration policy.
That being so, most reasonable people are comfortable saying to people from Georgia who have presented seeking asylum some formulation of the following sentence: Your country is safe; our country is pretty full; go home please.
Anyway, the question here is this: Why does RTE, a state funded broadcaster, insist on putting its thumb on the scale of the immigration debate in such a blatantly ideological and one-sided fashion? Why does it consistently treat the electorate as if Irish voters are just one news segment away from a pogrom against their doctors and nurses? Why, in short, does it treat its own viewers like utter fools?
I don’t watch RTE, personally. Five minutes of it the other night was enough of a reason to remind me why.