You will find, in my experience, no broad disagreement with the opinion that the lavish funding given to the state broadcaster, RTÉ, is an egregious waste of taxpayer funds, with an eye-watering €750 million being showered on the platform over just three years – an inexplicable reward coming just after the payments scandal.
It might be less inexplicable, of course, if RTÉ’s role in supporting the establishment’s narrative on everything from climate change to free speech and immigration is understood.
This week, the RTÉ documentary Who’s Building Ireland? set its agenda from the first frame, echoing the government line that what Ireland – a small country with housing and medical services already long past capacity – needs is more immigration, and plenty of it.
Less than 30 seconds into the programme, we’re told that “we need thirty or forty thousand skilled workers to come and build” houses or “we are goosed”, while the narrator intones that workers are leaving their countries and families behind to “help build ours”, as if major housing developments were being manned by volunteers for Habit for Humanity.
The programme never explores why we’re short of construction workers: why, according to a government report, 2,400 and 4,900 of these workers are leaving Ireland every year – or why the state makes no serious effort to bring home those with vital skills who emigrated during the crash home. We do know, just as has happened across all sectors, that young workers in particular are leaving because they can’t afford housing – in this case, the housing they are actually building. The fact that many who are emigrating are young and of an age where they should be establishing their own families is lining Ireland up for a demographic disaster from which we might not recover.
Nor is the demand side of the housing crisis every seriously addressed: every person who comes here to work needs somewhere to live and increasingly are also applying to being their families here under family reunification schemes. As happens all too often with RTÉ documentaries, pushing an agenda takes priority over a comprehensive examination of the problem or acknowledging the blindingly obvious.
Who’s Building Ireland? can be viewed on the RTÉ Player but its general approach was summed up in a wholly favourable review in the Irish Times who described the programme as “a quirky look at the building industry and also a bleak snapshot of a country with its feet clagged in a rising swell of racism.”
That’s the root of the problem right there: RTÉ are incapable to make a programme giving due credit to those building our homes without making a pitch for mass immigration and without painting Irish people as lousy racists – with the addition that some of us are lazy, shiftless layabouts incapable of working as hard as foreigners.
And this insulting stereotype against our own people is increasingly used to shut down any real debate about the fact that 24% of the people living here were born abroad, and that proportion is rocketing with unprecedented consequences not just for housing but for our identity and for our culture.
The Irish Times helpfully quoted one of the claims cheerfully made in ‘Whose Building Ireland’ as evidence that foreigners are better than the Irish, a claim that has also been not only by companies seeking to push down wages, but hinted at by state-funded bodies like the ESRI, and laid out in full colour in schoolbooks used in our classrooms.
“When a foreigner comes in here to work, he has a wife, he has a family at home, he cannot be dossing around bringing weed to work, not coming to work on Monday,” he says. “However, local guys do that.”
I’m not embedding the clip of this comment that’s being shared on social media mostly because the Polish man who made it shouldn’t be the focus of our disquiet: the national, tax-payer funded broadcaster encouraging this kind of lazy trope is the real problem, as is the rest of the establishment. Scene planning, question direction, final edits: they are in in the purview of the documentary-makers and of RTÉ.
Would that kind of remark be acceptable if it were made in the reverse: would it be laughed off if a builder was interviewed who said that Polish people were too fond of drinking vodka and it was better to hire hard-working Irish people? Of course it wouldn’t, and neither should it be. It doesn’t matter that the hard-work of Irish builders in the past was recognised, the main point is that, currently, Irish workers are inferior.
Lots of the other old tropes were there from the beginning too: it’s impossible to get Irish workers – another hint that we’re all just lazy, welfare-sponging layabouts who refuse to work on sites or anywhere else really, when the truth is that globalisation benefits greedy corporations most, and facilitates a race to the bottom for wages which the left is strangely indifferent to, blinded as they are by an ideological support for open borders and insisting that there should be “no limit” to the numbers coming here.
It was interesting that the roofing company featured hired “mainly Polish workers”. That’s not a problem: people are tribal and always will be – what is unacceptable though is this pretence from the establishment that Irish people are unwilling to work, a line repeatedly trotted out by major employers to a supplicant media for years as they import cheaper labour from the rest of the world, filling up huts with migrant workers who are underpaid for their labour.
There’s a poignant moment in the documentary when one father, Juan, talks about seeing his baby grow up over a screen, but that’s an argument against globalisation, against the endless movement of people around the globe to suit giant corporations, squeezing the last drop of profit out of ordinary people separated from their families. The impact that endless transience will have on the roots and social structures required for healthy, functioning societies remains remarkably under-discussed and unrecognised. The impact on identity and culture is obvious, and devastating. Citizens of the world actually belong nowhere.
The programme gets some things right: the people who work hard and employ considerable skills to build and maintain our homes have traditionally been under-appreciated, and this situation hasn’t been improved by the State’s failure to promote trade-learning or by society’s snobbish attitude towards the professions that are actually far more useful and important than many of those jobs which attract social capital. The humanity and decency of the people featured is obvious, and their commitment to their families is admirable.
But this is a film made with an agenda, and it reiterates a common theme in so much of the media commentary and reporting around this issue. Ignore the obvious: that we are short of housing largely because so many migrants, legal and illegal, are coming here; that we need construction workers because so many of our own have been forced to emigrate – and then work in multiple accusations of racism and ridiculous tropes about the lazy Irish to shut down any objections.
It’s a trend: as my friend Matt Treacy has pointed out, the ESRI is gaslighting us in its claim that migrants are better educated and harder-working than the slobby Irish, while our children are literally being taught in schoolbooks that GAA and trad-loving Irish families are small-minded, insular, nasty bigots in sharp contrast to wonderful diverse families.
I’ve given up expecting better from RTÉ. We all have. But while they have €750 million of our tax euros to burn through, expect more of the same. Get the actual facts elsewhere.