There is something almost poetic, I think, about the fact that the site for Ireland’s latest eruption of violent disorder over the Government’s immigration policy is, as the news endlessly tells us, “The site of the former Crown Paints factory in Coolock”.
At its height, the factory employed around 150 people. The first round of layoffs came in 1997. The factory and its associated warehouse struggled on until 2016, when the last of the jobs went, outsourced to cheaper production facilities overseas. At the time, SIPTU were distraught, saying “The loss of these jobs will have a devastating impact on our members, their families and the local community…. All but three of the workers are from the area around the warehouse which has been open since 1968.”
The jobs are gone, but the building still stands. Yesterday, amidst the rioting and the violence, I noted the usual sniffy snark from the well-to-do of middle Ireland: It’s well for them have the time to be out burning Garda cars on a Monday afternoon when the rest of us are at work.
Because, of course, the perpetrators of yesterday’s protest slash rioting were, in substantial part, drawn from the ranks of the unemployed and arguably unemployable. They’re about as close as you’ll get in Ireland to America’s deplorables: The mainly white, mainly poor, mainly under-educated masses in that country’s former industrial heartland who are drawn en masse to Donald Trump and who, in their simplicity, find the idea of Donald Trump owning a gold plated apartment aspirational rather than gauche. We have had media reports in the last few hours driving home the point: Garda sources, we are told, worry that known gangland figures are involved in the protests and the violence. No evidence, and no names, are provided: The whisper of criminality, paired with footage of rioting and audio of loud, angry working-class accents and haughty sniffs online about the dole, do the job.
What we are supposed to think is clear: This is the underclass.
The apotheosis of this attitude comes, generally, in the notion that the migrants who are the would-be occupants of the former factory are on a higher moral plane than the locals who are ferociously objecting to their arrival: If you wanted to craft the perfect morally superior middle class tweet about yesterday’s events, it would be something along the lines of “I’d rather migrants for neighbours than the kind of scumbags who burn garda cars”, even though the tweeter or commentator faces neither prospect.
My colleague Ben Scallan pointed out yesterday that nothing of what has occurred in Coolock ought to be shocking. Indeed, the Government was warned of it in an internal memo in May of 2022, which told them that a large influx of asylum seekers might threaten social cohesion, most particularly in deprived communities. That social cohesion has now broken down in one of the most deprived communities in Dublin is therefore something that should not be a shock. The shock, really, should be that the Government has pursued a policy that it knew would result in scenes such as those we saw yesterday.
At times like this, there is much pressure applied to people like me, who are broadly critical of Government immigration policy, to condemn the scenes we saw yesterday – as if the condemnation of people like me would matter a jot to a community which has already concluded, with some justification, that condemnation of their community is already state policy and that sneering at them is more a matter of middle-class recreation than it is a matter of morality. In any case, how can people like me condemn Coolock now, when we had nothing to say about the loss of 150 industrial jobs, or the rise of drug problems in that community, or when we turned a blind eye to its increasing fall into relative poverty compared to the rest of the state?
The rioting we saw yesterday happened, in large part, because those who rioted feel as if they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from taking the law into their own hands. Are they wrong? This is a community in which young people regularly spend a decade or more on state housing lists, watching the best years of their young lives wither away due to abject state disinterest. At the same time, a thousand or more people who arrived here in recent weeks are to be housed in a re-purposed facility which once, but no longer, provided employment to locals. They are witnessing vastly more energy being expended on solving the problems of the new Irish than was ever expended on them. Are they supposed to care what we think? Are condemnations from the great and the good supposed to move them to shame?
One of the most pernicious things about Irish immigration policy is the way in which its enactment is almost perfectly designed to reinforce antipathy to politicians by being imposed on communities which are already monuments to state failure. Today, for example, we learn that the village of Dundrum, in South Tipperary, with a population of 165, is to play host – whether it wishes to or not – to 280 migrants who will be hosted in the Dundrum House Hotel.
That hotel is, of course, a former “big house” – built in 1730 by the Maude family, Viscounts in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, across their nearly 3,000 acre estate. In the variously happy and unhappy years before independence, it was at the centre of the local community, providing Downton-Abbey style employment or in the IRA’s version, absentee landlord oppression – take your pick – to the people of Dundrum. In latter years it became a resort hotel, with a heavily marketed golf course spread across the former Maude estate. In 2014, at the tail end of the recession, it went into receivership – one of many businesses destroyed by the economic incompetence of the Irish state.
Now, it is to become a hub for migrants, who are to be dropped en masse into a village that, thanks to the destruction of the estate and then the hotel, has very little going for it. Just as in Coolock, the immigration policy is built from the ground up on the ashes of industrial and commercial failure. Two very different communities, in two very different parts of Ireland, are set to experience immigration the same way: As both a slap in the face, and as the total loss of any hope that the economic loss of opportunity they suffered will ever be reversed. In both cases, they will be told that their discontent is just racism and bigotry. In both cases, the state will seek to impose its will by force, if necessary.
And in both cases, as Matt Treacy has pointed out on these pages, a new class of absentee landlords will be the financial beneficiaries.
I am, as regular readers may have divined, not a sympathiser with the hardline brand of flag-waving Irish nationalism which often dominates the anti-immigration protest scene. Yet it seems to me relatively obvious that the historical parallels that hardline nationalists seek to draw between the worst excesses of the British state in Ireland, and the broad attitudes of the Irish state to these same communities, are apt. Both the British at their most foolish and high-handed, and their present successors in Dublin, treat these communities as broadly inconvenient and their objections as petty and trifling compared to the big picture. For the British, at least, that big picture was the wider good of the Empire which they believed, in their defence, to be of benefit to themselves and the world. The Irish attitude is arguably worse, being as it is based on little more than satisfying an endless and tiresome sense of moral superiority over its own underclass.
It also seems relatively obvious to me that moral preaching about the villainy of yesterday’s protestors will not make the problem go away. The problem is structural: A state which is unable to solve the problems of its own people, but eager to make up for that failure by performatively solving the problems of migrants from other nations.
There will be more riots, and more discontent, and more disorder. Whether people like me condemn it or not.