Why, if it isn’t the consequences of his own policies:
For the first time ever in the history of the state there is NO emergency accommodation in Dublin for families.
The government must act IMMEDIATELY to bring vacant and derelict homes into use.
This is no longer a crisis but a catastrophe. pic.twitter.com/JpnkxckchM
— Richard Boyd Barrett (@RBoydBarrett) June 29, 2022
Let’s be quite clear, for the maybe 1% of people who can’t do basic maths: There is no emergency accommodation available in Dublin because the state has taken the decision, as a matter of morality, to allocate it all to people fleeing the war in Ukraine.
And let’s be further clear: If politicians and the public want to support people fleeing the war in Ukraine, then that is a legitimate political choice to make.
But as ever, in Ireland, there appears to be no understanding at all that choices have consequences. And in this case, the choice to allocate our emergency accommodation to refugees means that said emergency accommodation is not available for other families or individuals who might need it. Those people are not victims of Government incompetence. They are victims of a political choice made by the Government – a choice it has been repeatedly urged to make by, amongst others, one Richard Boyd Barrett.
This is, I think, the single biggest problem with the Irish media, and Irish political literacy: The public are led to believe by politicians that they can have all things at once: That, in this specific case, they can be the country which takes more Ukrainians than any other, and also, at the same time, retain a good supply of emergency accommodation when it is needed by people other than Ukrainian refugees. The truth is that no Government – not this one, not any – could magically create extra buildings on the scale required to host all of these people without impacting existing services in a period of four months.
And yet, these two issues – Ukrainian refugees and the shortage of housing – are covered almost as two separate, unrelated, completely alien items. And politicians like Boyd Barrett are allowed to get away with taking the popular side on both the cause, and the effect.
I got some pushback, incidentally, from readers on a recent article where I also made the point above that accommodating Ukrainians is a “legitimate political choice”. What I mean by that is not that it is the right thing to do, just that it is something that Government has a political right to advocate for, and to enact as a policy. That’s legitimate.
What’s not legitimate, though, is for them to be allowed to pretend that their choices have no consequences and that those entirely predictable consequences have instead magically appeared out of nowhere. And that goes for the opposition as well. It is a basic duty of the media, after all, to hold politicians to account for their decisions. The Irish media, on immigration, is terrified of doing so. In general, it will just go along with the Government’s fantasy that it can have it’s cake, and eat it.
The longer term consequence of this is bad policy.
It leads, for example, to this: Richard Boyd Barrett cannot blame the refugee situation for the housing crisis because, of course, that would be heresy to the left, and also hypocritical. So, instead, he finds others to blame: Developers. Landlords. Banks. Greed. You can write the list yourself. All of those groups end up taking the public blame for political decisions. And then, in turn, there are bad laws passed to “punish” them.
That’s – at least in part – how we ended up with Dublin’s disastrous rent cap policy, which has failed miserably.
This is why the media needs to take a big portion of the blame for the housing crisis: You can be sure, for example, that Boyd Barrett will not be asked about the dichotomy between his views on Ukrainian refugees and his complaints about emergency accommodation when he makes his next bi-weekly appearance on RTE. Instead, unless the formbook is entirely upended, he will be allowed to intone his usual spiel about how Government is in hoc to the greedy bankers and the vulture landlord class. The media has a responsibility to challenge and interrogate these ideas. They simply do not do so, with the hard left. It’s gotten to the point where you wonder if many of them have the basic intellectual capacity to challenge, so reluctant do they appear to do so.
And there’s another problem here: The dogs on the street can see the problem. It’s not as if the influx of migrants is a secret, given that it’s on the news every night. It doesn’t take some political genius to spot that as the number of migrants and refugees rise, the amount of available accommodation falls. A political class that pretends that there’s some other, more complicated answer that the poor bigoted Joe Soap just can’t understand isn’t winning the support it might think it is. It is just winning a sullen silence, and the quiet shaking of heads, and, in time, a backlash.
The media has a basic duty to stand up for that Joe Soap, by the way. But it’s a job it just does not want to do.