One of the problems, I think, with modern politics is the idea that there must never be a hard choice.
For example, your average left-wing student will angrily insist that suggesting that there is a choice to be made between housing refugee populations on one hand and housing Irish students on the other is de facto racist, because the truly progressive nation will do both. That is also, as I understand it, the position of most of our opposition political parties: That there is no choice at all, because a competent Government would simply house both the student population, and all of those who have fled here because of war or famine or because, eh, we’re giving out visas.
And yet, here we are. Trinity Students are now demanding offline learning, so to speak, because there are no homes left for them.
https://twitter.com/tcdsuwelfare/status/1567879095333142530
They’re learning, bless them, an important truth, though I suspect they will not internalise it.
That lesson is that there are hard choices.
Because the fact is that if the Government decided tomorrow that it would make available houses for everyone who wants or needs one, those houses would have to be built, and that will take time. In the meantime, someone will have to go without. That someone, on this occasion, is students.
It is hard to feel sorry for them. At least, on the collective level.
It is a simple statement of fact that the more houses we provide to our guests from overseas, the fewer houses there are for Irish people. That is not a “far right” statement – it is a simple statement of mathematics. We are increasing the population at a faster rate than we are building new homes to accommodate the population. That is not only affecting students, but actually our new guests themselves, as we discovered recently with another announcement:
The State’s national athletics centre is to be used as temporary emergency accommodation for refugees this autumn, Sport Ireland has said.
The sporting body said the move was being made in response to a request from the Government as the State continues to come under pressure to house newly arriving Ukrainian refugees amid the current housing crisis. The matter has recently been further exasperated by student accommodation no longer being unavailable to house refugees due to the return of third-level institutions for the new academic year.
Here’s the truth, and this is not an ideological truth, but a mathematical one: We simply do not have the homes or the roofs or the beds for the number of people we are taking in. The people we are taking in are suffering as a result, being sent, as they are, to delapidated hotels and the national athletics centre. Our students are suffering from it, campaigning as they are for at-home tuition.
There are two possible solutions to this problem: One is long term, the other short.
The long-term solution is to build more homes. But even that solution does not work if we continue – as is policy – to accept “as many people who want to come here”. Because as the supply of homes rises, so will the numbers coming here to occupy those homes.
The short-term solution is to limit the number of refugees we accept, but of course we cannot do that because of the national conviction, shared amongst everyone who really matters in this country that to do such a thing would be unforgivably racist.
Since neither of these options can be adopted, we have no other choice really than to turn the national athletics centre into a hotel, and ask students to give up on actually attending college. Politicians who pretend these are not the choices are, by the way, lying to you. And lying openly.
None of this, by the way, affects me, or people like me, who are not students, or living in Dublin, or, thankfully, seeking places to live. But there is a sort of justice in that it affects the demographic – young activist student types – who are most avid in their insistence that this is the way things must be.
The rest of us will simply have to wait until the point comes – eventually – when people realise that basic mathematics are not racist. There is a limit to the number of people we can aid with the resources available to us. It is not, actually, progressive to bring people to Ireland and house them in an Athletics centre.
It is embarrassing.