Noel Grealish TD was in the wars again yesterday over immigration. This time, he was accused of racism for asking the Taoiseach at leaders questions about the amount of money leaving Ireland in “remittances” to Nigeria. A remittance is money sent home by an emigrant. For many years, for example, Irish families benefitted from money […]
The Taoiseach was out and about this morning, giving a speech to the annual conference of the immigrant council of Ireland. Immigration has been something of a hot button of late, with controversies over direct provision erupting across the country. The Government is committed to introducing hate speech legislation to try and clamp down on […]
There is an emerging pattern in the way the Irish Government attempts to deal with its migrant accommodation crisis, and the way the policy plays out for everybody concerned. A small town, usually one hit hard by emigration and de-industrialisation, learns very late in the process – often only days or weeks before the migrants […]
A row between local residents, Government, and a prominent local business family over the provision of direct provision has broken out in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, where over 1,100 people have signed a petition saying that they no longer feel safe walking through their own town because of large groups of migrants congregating in the centre […]
A fascinating proposal from Fianna Fáil’s justice spokesman – I look forward to seeing the uptake in his own constituency of Dublin Bay South. Jim O’Callaghan made the proposal that families should take in asylum seekers in conversation with Fine Gael Minister David Stanton in the Dáil this morning. He suggested that families who housed […]
A funny thing about the way the Irish media conducts its business is that it is perfectly capable of talking about two separate issues without ever allowing a connection to be drawn between the two, in case people might draw the right wrong conclusions. In Ireland now, the media is completely convinced of two things: […]
This weekend’s Sunday Times featured a chillingly authoritarian line from influential columnist Justine McCarthy, writing in frustration at events in Oughterard last week. Emphasis mine: “The people who repeat these mantras call themselves “the silent majority”. They are neither. They are, in fact, a minority in a country that has repeatedly shown itself to be […]
Immigration is one of those topics that most reasonable, middle of the road Irish people run away from talking about, for the simple reason that there seems to be no way of talking about it without annoying somebody from one of the two camps that seem to dominate the discussion. Camp one, of course, is […]
Ireland, as we know, has two police forces these days. There is, on the one hand, the Gardai, dedicated to enforcing the laws of the land, passed by the Dáil. And then on the other hand, there is the entity that radio presenters and newspaper reporters refer to as “twitter”, which is dedicated to enforcing […]
The accused 46-year-old man was denied bail after a court heard Gardaí were “at a loss” as to how he entered the country.
More than half of Ireland’s population growth in 2018 came from net migration into the country according to the Central Statistics Office’s annual Population and Migration Estimates released today.
Well, no, it’s not really “new”.