Immigration to Ireland has reached unprecedented levels. Around 20 per cent of the Irish population was foreign born as of the 2022 census, compared with just six per cent in the 1990s. Asylum claims have also reached record levels, leading the government to house asylum seekers in hotels all over the country. Even the most rural, remote parts of Ireland have been touched by the migration crisis. Protests against the hotels, and even full-blown riots, are now regular occurrences, with the 2023 Dublin riots marking the worst civil unrest in decades.
Ian O’Doherty – columnist at the Irish Independent and host of The State of Us – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss Ireland’s migration crisis. What follows is an edited extract of their conversation. You can watch the full conversation here.
Brendan O’Neill: What’s the political temperature like in Ireland right now?
Ian O’Doherty: Immigration is still the third rail of Irish politics, and it’s only getting worse. It really is the biggest issue in the country, and it has been the biggest issue in the country for a long time. The Irish once prided themselves on being the most welcoming place in Europe. We’re a small rock on the edge of a continent that doesn’t really care about us, so we’ve always had this desire to be the best in the class. But in the past few years, there’s been a real change in general attitudes.
Politicians and the media have sold the narrative that anybody opposed to immigration is automatically a bigot. People resent that, and it’s become very ugly at times. I’ve always considered myself a sensible critic of unfettered, untrammelled immigration. Every country has the right to control its own borders. That’s not racist. And we’re a small country with a small population. Despite what the far left and a lot of NGOs are saying, you can’t just open the borders here – it’s a recipe for disaster.
There’s not much of a nuanced debate going on. When we were kids, there was a quiz show on TV called Runaround, where the children in the studio had to jump onto one particular circle when they thought they had the right answer. In a weird way, the West – and Ireland in particular – has become a political version of Runaround. An issue gets brought up, and everybody runs to be in their particular spot. Apart from being dangerous, it’s really dull. The Irish used to be known for their ability to have a good argument. We would argue until the cows came home. But now there’s a really nasty element on both sides.
O’Neill: Can you tell us about the recent developments that have taken place in Ireland in relation to immigration?
O’Doherty: There are no vast metropolises in Ireland. Cork and Dublin are the two biggest cities, but by British standards, they’re fairly small. So what we’ve seen is the farming out of refugees and asylum seekers to mostly rural areas, and all it’s done is sow distrust. These places are already under-served, and people already feel that they’ve been left behind. Then they see the one local hotel – where they would have their weddings, or their funerals, or their afters for the confirmations – basically turned into refugee centres. Of course, a business is a business, and if you’re a hotel owner then accepting guaranteed full-booking makes perfect financial sense. But this was always going to stoke resentment.
I find it’s very easy for a lot of the Irish left to sneer at the working classes. There’s a sense that if you’re going to punch down, punch down on the white working class – that’s seen not only as acceptable, but laudable, too. The problem is, when you refuse to allow people to ventilate their opinions, if you just keep on saying ‘We’re going to do you under hate-speech legislation’, people only become more resentful, and even more extreme in their opinions. If you keep on pushing them, eventually they’re going to push back.
O’Neill: How much do you think that class disparity contributes to the cultural divide?
O’Doherty: It’s a class divide that is driven by a geographical divide, in the sense that it’s the rural working-class areas that are most gravely impacted. There are no hotels being used to house migrants in the leafy parts of Dublin, as far as I know. I’m open to correction – but I think we would have heard about it, because the locals there tend to have more political clout. They’re the accountants and the doctors and the barristers.
For example, you can look at their attitude towards a place like Crumlin, where I’m originally from. About 10 or 15 years ago, there was a big war between two rival drug gangs. There were bodies dropping every week. We had never seen anything like it. It was very vicious, very nasty. But there were huge amounts of ignorant, middle-class journalists – who only ever drive through a working-class area when they’re on the way out to Dublin Airport – who were only too happy to accept that people from Crumlin were simply genetically predisposed to killing each other. At least more so than their peers from their graduate classroom. And it was bloody infuriating. You can’t just demonise an entire class of people. The way the north side of Dublin is portrayed by the Irish media is very much like how Punch magazine used to portray the Irish back in the 19th century – as apes and monkeys, uncivilised savages. A lot of the stuff I’ve seen published in the past 10 to 15 years – whether it’s about Crumlin or Tallaght or Artane or Finglas on the north side – it’s just Punch all over again. And nobody seems to care.
Brendan O’Neill was speaking to Ian O’Doherty. Watch the full conversation here:
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