It is an extraordinary thing, in a modern western democracy, to hear a mainstream politician openly suggesting a complete ban on all immigration. Such calls, after all, are usually reserved to the fringes of the political fringe. Even Donald Trump, the most openly anti-immigration world leader of recent times, never went so far as to […]
The EU’s border agency, Frontex, has been given new powers to oversee the deportation of illegal immigrants. In a new strategy revealed by the European Commission on Tuesday, Frontex will be at the centre of new plans to send illegal migrants home once they are denied entry into Europe. “Frontex will become the European Union’s […]
If you were scouring the Sunday Newspapers yesterday for a word of criticism of the Government’s plan to give an amnesty, and path to citizenship, to thousands of illegal immigrants, you will have been disappointed. Pieces like that do not tend to make the Irish newspapers. Part of it, of course, is the fear that […]
Malta Today carried a very interesting piece on its news site yesterday. It details how in the past few days a group of unprocessed migrants were sent by Malta to this country. According to the report, this was the fourth such relocation from Malta in March. It does not say whether we were also […]
“Asylum seekers”, you might note, is not a phrase that ever appears these days, in most of the media. And it certainly does not appear in Government news releases. Instead, the new, PR-friendly term is “international protection applicants”. And said international protection applicants got good news yesterday, courtesy of Roderic O’Gorman and Simon Harris: Today, […]
The worst bit about all of this, of course, is that we didn’t even get a link out of it. Like it would have killed the Deputy to send us a bit of traffic. Though, to be fair, the article in question did very well anyway: It’s a niche website & I’m not going to […]
One of the main advantages, we’re always told, of European Union membership, is that it affords Irish people the right to travel to and live freely in 26 other European countries. No passport checks, no immigration requirements, no papers – just hop on a plane, land in Vienna or Rome or Bucharest, and you’re as […]
The publication of an ESRI report on forecast population growths and consequent housing requirements was published on December 14. The report, Regional Demographics and Structural Housing Demand at County Level was compiled by TCD research professor Adele Bergin and Abian Garcia Rodriguez of the ESRI. As John McGuirk noted yesterday, all the forecasts contained are dependent on arbitrary […]
Extraordinary. Usually, in Ireland, if you say that one way to reduce the demand for housing is to lower immigration, you’ll be dismissed as a rabid racist who’s peddling fake news. But in the Irish Independent this morning, no less an authority than the ESRI is out warning that a reduction in immigration, due to […]
There is, in Ireland, a law against stealing cars. If you steal someone’s car, you are liable to be arrested, prosecuted, and, if convicted, either fined or sent to prison. If the Gardai recover the car you stole, it will be returned to its original owner. So imagine for a moment how people might react […]
Governments seldom fulfil promises made in pre election manifestos or even Programmes for Government. So the small and fractured Green Party can be happy that when it disappears again from public prominence, it will have left yet another toxic legacy as it did in 2011. For a party that only won 7% of the vote in the […]
The Lancet is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious medical journals. It is also highly influential in the world of health policy formulation. It can quite literally be a career making event for a researcher or a scientist to have their work published in the journal. Indeed, in the niche world of […]