Responding to a call last week by Independent TD Mattie McGrath for a cap on the number of migrants that the Irish Government is willing to accommodate, his constituency colleague in Tipperary, Fine Gael TD Garret Ahearn, declared that such comments were “reckless” and “do not reflect the vast majority of people”. He went on, as is almost traditional now, to warn that “such language has harmful undertones” and that it was “not based on facts” and that it might “damage the welcoming reputation Ireland has internationally”.
Almost nothing that Deputy Ahearn said was correct, or even arguable, based on the facts.
First, the idea that any questioning of, or adopting a position contrary to, the most liberal possible immigration policy is “reckless” is an idea that has become embedded deeply in Ireland’s political class. It is the standard response. To express support for anything other than unlimited immigration in Ireland will earn you a suggestion that merely expressing such thoughts is dangerous and irresponsible.
This, however, is untrue: Immigration is a policy just like any other. It is legitimate to debate the Government’s policy on income tax; or whether to legalise drugs; or whether to build a new hospital and where to build it. We debate these policies because they have social and economic consequences for the people who live in this country, and share, at least in theory, in its governance.
Immigration is a policy with economic and social consequences. That is not in dispute. Indeed, the Government itself admits that this is the case, when they talk about the challenges posed by the need to accommodate so many migrants. It is legitimate to talk about it, and it is legitimate to adopt a different position on it to the one taken by the Government, and indeed the political class as a whole.
Most people in Ireland, as it happens, have already arrived at a different position, if polling is to be believed. In April this year, a poll for the Sunday Times found that 60% of the Irish public supported the idea of putting a cap on the number of refugees coming into Ireland. Indeed, at the only time in living memory that the Irish public has voted directly on any issue even tangentially related to immigration, the citizenship referendum of 2004, the Irish public voted by 80% to 20% to change the constitution in a way designed to make inward migration less attractive.
Public sentiment on this issue is not based on bigotry. To find evidence of that, one need only look around. On the issue of Ukrainian refugees, for example, all that Government has done is open the door. The actual work of accommodating, welcoming, and making those refugees feel safe has not been done by Government, but by the Irish public. It is members of the public who have organised welcoming days in their schools; organised aid and care packages for newly arrived families, and worked, often without the promised supports by Government, to accommodate Ukrainian families. That the Irish public is welcoming and warm and full of people who wish to do good is axiomatic.
But what is also axiomatic is that there are practical limits to this country’s – or any other’s – ability to accommodate an unlimited number of people before there are serious and lasting negative consequences. Having run out of available homes, both for our own people and for inward arriving migrants, Ireland has already resorted to colonising our hotel capacity in cities and towns across Ireland to use for migrant accommodation. This is pushing hotel prices skywards, while also providing a deeply unsatisfactory standard of living for the migrants themselves. Migrants are also living in student accommodation, meaning that there will be a crisis of one kind, or another, come the autumn, where either migrants will need to find somewhere else to live, or students will.
Schools around the country are also feeling the pressure. The Government’s commitment to smaller class sizes cannot withstand a situation where many schools have ten or fifteen extra students in every class.
None of this, we repeat, is to blame those already here, or to lay the fault for Government policy at their feet. It is simply to say what Mattie McGrath, and others, have: That capping the number of people we can accommodate is not an expression of cruelty or bigotry, but an expression of our own ability to do basic mathematics.
The attitude of the political class on this issue, and their suggestion that any dissent equates automatically to bigotry, is crass and insulting. There is a strong argument, for example, that it is much more bigoted to behave as they do: To treat vulnerable migrants as a head count only, and to measure our compassion in raw numbers, rather than deeds.
It is not, for example, compassionate to arbitrarily rip a migrant family that has settled in one part of the country, where their children have found a school and friends and their parents jobs, and to dump them unceremoniously with 12 hours warning in Temple Bar. But that is what the Government did, just last month. That was the work of Garret Ahearn’s party, not of Mattie McGrath. As is often the case in Ireland, “compassion” is just an adjective Government uses to describe itself. A marketing term, not a word with any meaning.
That this situation is not sustainable is obvious to anybody with eyes who wishes to see. Over the weekend, some social media channels saw the hashtag “Ireland is Full” trending. Part of that may have been the work of activists, but it also represents a growing sentiment. Not a sentiment that migrants are undeserving, or that we do not want to help – simply that the country has already reached the very outer limits of its capacity to do so.
Putting a cap on migrant numbers tomorrow would not be a bigoted, or a backwards step. It would simply be a sensible, logical, necessary and popular recognition of the facts on the ground.