Voices
There are so many intricate strands that it is difficult to unravel them or understand how they truly knit together.
The week began with a terse, and thoroughly avoidable, dispute between Ireland and the UK after Helen McEntee, the justice minister, proclaimed 80 per cent of recent asylum claims were from people who arrived in the state after crossing the border with Northern Ireland.
It ended with reports in The Daily Telegraph, the media organ of choice for asinine Tory leaks, that Downing Street would offer Ireland the chance to join the Rwanda scheme.
In between, on Dublin’s Mount Street, Taoiseach Simon Harris mounted what he would later describe as a “humanitarian operation” to remove 200 asylum seekers and their tents from outside the International Protection Office (IPO) and relocate them to International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS)-designated accommodation.
Within days, more than 100 asylum seekers who turned up at the IPO’s Mount Street office were receiving letters informing them that “no further offers of accommodation” were available, before being instructed to promptly “disperse and leave” the area.
Unsurprisingly, many set up tents in nearby parks.
Meanwhile, 16 protesters turned up outside the Taoiseach’s home, some of whom had held signs which said ‘South Dublin Says No Close The Borders’, while a Sky News investigation revealed that US users were responsible for most posts on X mentioning the location of a recent violent protest outside a site being converted to asylum accommodation near the town of Newtownmountkennedy.
I could, sadly, go on.
Migration has become the defining issue of our politics and our public discourse. It is being exacerbated, of course, by the other defining issue, the housing crisis. But it is migration that has the potential to become more visceral, more violent, more divisive and more politically reactionary.
It is not an issue that is new to the world. But it is relatively new to Ireland. As Tommie Gorman wrote in his thoughtful essay yesterday, we are struggling to deal with “what is an unavoidable new reality”.
Take, by way of example, the actions and statements of Simon Harris and Helen McEntee last week.
I am not sure of the justice minister’s motivation for the comments on the cross-border flow of asylum seekers. Perhaps Helen McEntee was caught off guard, or perhaps it was designed to show that the increasing number of people entering the country is not within her government’s control.
Either way, it was politically naive, given that there was no real data to support the claim, and it also fed into the Tory narrative that Brexit was working.
The issue, as we know, is easily fixable — define the UK as a safe third country under Irish law (something that is now happening), and then focus on the profile of people coming in. Are they likely to receive asylum status? If not, they can be detained and sent to their country of origin.
There has been no coherent narrative underpinning the Government’s strategy, and that strategy is not readily coherent either.
However, the intervention was clumsy and unnecessary, conflating one divisive issue (migration) with another (the border).
Simon Harris’s Mount Street salvo made for good headlines. It was typical of the gung-ho, action-packed leadership style he said he would bring to the role. But it was more soundbite than strategy, as evidenced by the tents popping up in Ballsbridge just days later. Corrective actions that make you feel good are not always the right policy choice.
But there is also a subtle sense that talking tough on border crossings and dismantling tented villages are designed to appease the growing number of voters shifting their electoral preferences to the right and to independents.
This is something Stephen explored in his column last week when he examined why someone might vote for anti-migrant politicians:
“The natural question is why someone might choose to take their vote they previously indicated in polls as going to Sinn Féin or Fianna Fáil and say they are voting independent. What are their economic incentives? What are the institutional questions they pose? Why are independents the ones who are absorbing the votes of the angry? There is a simple answer. The independents are free to express local dissatisfaction with the migration question in a way parties are not.”
And, in many cases, this local dissatisfaction is understandable. It is hard to explain to the people of Co Clare why one-third of all registered hotel rooms in the county are now contracted for emergency accommodation and no longer available for the country’s vital offering.
Likewise, it is hard to explain to the businesses around Mount Street why a tented village emerged in the first place.
There has been no coherent narrative underpinning the Government’s strategy, and that strategy is not readily coherent either.
It gives ground to the far right, to those who protest outside of the homes of the Taoiseach and proclaim that Ireland is full. When people don’t understand what is happening, and in this case, many do not, it leads to fear.
And as we know, fear often leads to action.
In his essay, Tommie looked at the views of Peter Sutherland, who, in later years, campaigned heavily on migration issues, becoming UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration.
In 2012, Sutherland co-authored a report with Anna Cecilia Malmström, the Swedish-born EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, on Europe’s immigration challenge. The opening paragraph is striking:
“Europe faces an immigration predicament. Mainstream politicians, held hostage by xenophobic parties, adopt anti-immigrant rhetoric to win over a fearful public, while the foreign-born are increasingly marginalized in schools, cities and at the workplace. Yet, despite high unemployment across much of the Continent, too many employers lack the workers they need. Engineers, doctors and nurses are in short supply; so, too, are farmhands and health aides. And Europe can never have enough entrepreneurs, whose ideas drive economies and create jobs.”
This was a point that Tommie explored when he examined migration trends from Ireland to the UK, and from Europe into Ireland. If Ireland’s economic growth is to continue, it will require a workforce to sustain it.
“The workers will require houses and schools and transport systems and health services. The new cohort of housebuilders will themselves require houses,” Tommie wrote.
This is the message that the Government needs to articulate, rather than a reactionary drift to the right. There are no easy solutions to this issue. As we see across Europe, it is highly complex and extremely contested.
Hugo Brady, an Irish-born migration specialist who previously served as a senior adviser to Donald Tusk during his presidency of the EU Council, has written extensively on the topic.
In a recent paper for the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, Brady set out the European context for the new EU migration pact, something that is designed to create a coherent EU-wide strategy. He wrote:
“The timing of the EU’s latest border and asylum reforms, eked out after a decade of failure, is not random or taking place in a geopolitical vacuum. Internal politics aside, European democracies are compelled to act on immigration as the world around them becomes wracked by centrifugal global forces. On the one hand, the EU is steeling itself finally decisively to end the Mediterranean boat crisis while erecting a reformed and newly high-tech external border.
“On the other, the Union’s six largest countries are legislating to admit unprecedented numbers of foreign workers before 2030, relaxing qualification criteria and visa requirements in key economic sectors. This political turn to ‘toughen up and open up’ has occurred incrementally and is entirely event-driven, as is evidenced by the von der Leyen Commission’s softer stance on the funding of ‘walls’ and other infrastructures at external land borders over the mandate.”
The Government favours the Pact. Sinn Fein, without clearly articulating its policies one way or the other, is against it. But the answer, as Sutherland argued so passionately, is a Europe-wide strategy.
Yes, we can pull tents down. Yes, we can talk tough to the UK. But the response to this issue, an issue that will become more pronounced and more complex, requires a European-wide solution.
As Tommie wrote yesterday, Peter Sutherland, in his later years, spoke what he believed was the unvarnished truth to power – people seek a better life.
As our politics and political discourse become more charged and more contested, we could do well to remember that.
Elsewhere last week, Dublin Bus chief executive Billy Hann reflected on some of the major challenges for the organisation since he took the reins nearly a year and a half ago.
“Our passenger journey numbers last year were 146 million, which was over 20 per cent higher than it was in 2022. When you compare it to a pre-pandemic world and compared to 2019, it was about six per cent higher than that,” Hann told Jonathan.
On Friday, it emerged that Ulster Bank and Dilosk had agreed to sell the last of its loans as it exits the Republic of Ireland to ICS Mortgages, the residential lending arm of Dilosk, subject to regulatory approval. Thomas examined what it means for mortgage holders.
Susan Spence and Vicki O’Toole have both sold businesses in recent times. Marco Donzelli leads a global accountancy network. At a recent HLB event, they told Tom Lyons their stories and offered real-life advice on running — and selling — a company.
Briefing documents released to The Currency showed the tactics employed by Revenue officials to seize drugs. They also revealed new trends in where drugs are coming from and how they are being distributed.
