The Government, readers of the Sunday Business Post will have learned over the weekend, is considering whether to set up something called “border detention centres” to deal with the immigration crisis.
“Detention”, obviously, implies restriction on movement. Migrants will arrive, be detained, and not allowed access to the countryside or our cityscapes until such time as their application has been “processed”. How long such a plan would survive contact with the Irish courts and an armada of state-funded NGOs who are probably already preparing legal cases against detention is anyone’s guess. In any case, we will not find out for some years: Per the Business Post, the plan is not scheduled to be introduced until 2026, and then only conditional on Ireland’s participation in the EU migration pact.
In any case, more interesting than the policy – since the policy is years away at the earliest – is the decision to announce the policy in a Sunday Newspaper. This Irish Government -or at least the part of it briefing the Sunday Business Post – has a new political identity, and it wants you to address it by the correct pronouns: They/Them/Tough-ish on Immigration.
But what Irish Government, exactly? The new Taoiseach remains, for now, the Minister for Higher Education. For at least one more week, the head of Government remains the departing, but not quite yet departed, Leo Varadkar. And while the country suffers the smell of decomposition from the as-yet-undead Varadkar reign, there’s growing evidence of a real identity crisis for the incoming Harris administration and the political class as a whole.
Consider immigration just on its own: Two days before the big announcement of detention centres coming in 2026, there was another announcement, this time from the Minister for perma-crisis, Roderic O’Gorman: “A revised plan to house asylum-seekers will see the State purchase turn-key properties, empty offices and deliver rapid-build homes in a bid to deliver 14,000 extra beds by 2028.”
On the one hand, then, we are to crack down on immigration by 2026, and lock arriving migrants up in detention camps to demonstrate that we’re no soft touch. On the other, we’re to buy up turn-key properties, outbidding the private sector if necessary, and hand 14,000 extra beds over to the “new Irish”. One might be forgiven for thinking that the right hand doesn’t know what the, eh, left hand is doing.
Nor is this crisis of political identity limited to immigration. While I was safely and blessedly on holiday last week, the Government appeared to have a full-blown crackup on the proposed, and yet moribund, hate speech legislation. Declared opponents of that law now include Grandees like Michael Ring, Charlie Flanagan, and Willie O’Dea. Defenders include the outgoing Taoiseach and the entirely-in-limbo Minister for Justice, who does not know whether she will still be the Minister for Justice next week. Other defenders include Fine Gael’s south Dublin roysh-on club of Senator Barry Ward, Minister Neale Richmond, and the goys, as well as the entirety of the Green Party, while opponents of hate legislation now include the entirety of the Sinn Fein parliamentary party.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, Mary Lou McDonald continued the new, and yet not-so-new Republican strategy of advancing in reverse: Sinn Fein’s relentless drift towards normalising (at least in Irish political terms) its attitude to the European Union was suddenly turned on its head: Sinn Fein in Government, she announced, will stand up to these European Mandarins, rather than simply taking orders as our current Government (she implies) does. What this means in practice is anybody’s guess, but what it means in political terms is fairly obvious: The party wants its rebel identity back, come hell or high water. They’re against “open borders” now too, per Matt Carthy on television last week. At this rate, one might soon expect a sit-down interview between Mary Lou and Philip Dwyer about her party’s unshakeable commitment to an Ireland for the Irish. Howiya folks.
Into this maelstrom of uncertainty, then, is soon to wade our youngest ever Taoiseach. About Simon Harris only a few things can be written with any certainty: That he is young (you may have heard this, in the mainstream media coverage). That he is good at TikTok (no fewer than three articles in the newspapers on this topic over the weekend). And that he is politically malleable to an almost psychotic degree, as his conversion from hardline young pro-lifer to a brief, but unlikely zenith as political sex symbol for the repeal-jumper-wearing thirty-something demonstrates.
That all of this is funny is indisputable, but the more pressing point is that it’s akin to watching a dog suddenly trying to speak Japanese: You can see the confusion on political faces, the sense that suddenly Irish politicos are in a foreign land where they at best speak pidgin voter. They are aware enough to know that the ground has shifted beneath their feet, but decades of speaking only fluent NGO-ese means that their ability to genuinely connect with the discontented has atrophied. Thus what we’re seeing is a kind of frantic waving of political hands, like yours truly trying to order a Monaghan-style milky tea in some French village (“non, OH LATE, do you hear me? OH GRANDAY LATE”) while gesticulating wildly in the hope that the truculent foreigner will understand.
Thus, the contortions: The transparent attempt, having spent years accusing everybody else of “dog-whistling”, to learn how to do it themselves. The challenge of learning how to tell barbarian tricolour-wavers in Drimnagh that you’re on their side, while reassuring righteous rainbow-wavers in Dublin 2 that this is all for show and that the political heart of the nation remains pure and compassionate. TDs despatched in all political directions, seeking, in effect, anything that might stick.
At the heart of this problem is a simple fact: That for decades now, Irish politicians have lacked any true identity of their own: The clothes have been manufactured for them by the likes of Colm O’Gorman at his former perch atop Amnesty Ireland, or by the National Wimmin’s Council, or by the nice people at the Migrants Rights Campaign or the Transgender Equality Network. Those clothes having gone out of fashion, our politicians suddenly find themselves with nothing to wear, and no sewing skills. They’re left naked, and desperate, and afraid of a coming political storm.