“Everybody has a plan,” Mike Tyson famously remarked, “until they get punched in the face”. In 2021, the Irish government had a plan to provide better accommodation for asylum seekers in Ireland: Roderic O’Gormon, Ireland’s equality and integration minister, sent out tweets in eight languages advertising it to the world. The state would provide them with “own-door” accommodation within a few months of arriving, the minister promised, in languages including Arabic, Albanian, Somali, Urdu and French.
The following year, Ireland’s non-Ukrainian asylum claims soared 400 per cent. Over the next two years, more than 26,000 people turned up claiming asylum – triple the numbers in the last year before the pandemic. The Irish state, already facing a housing crisis and strained by its commitments to Ukrainian refugees, (here comes the punch in the face) couldn’t house them all and so gobbled up spare accommodation and hotels across the countryside, decimating much of its tourist sector. Locals who complained were dismissed by Dublin as dog-whistling bumpkins. But the problem has now announced itself to the country’s liberal elites in the form of a sprawling tent city in the heart of Dublin.
Why would a government minister advertise Ireland to asylum seekers in a manner befitting of an estate agent, you might ask. The answer is that Ireland’s liberal establishment tends to feel rather than think their way into policies. They were elated by the idea (as well as the optics) of Ireland as a safe haven for as many refugees as possible. But they did not anticipate being overwhelmed by the surge in arrivals – or that the newcomers would, like in the rest of Europe, consist largely of young male economic migrants posing as refugees. And little thought was given over to what this would mean for Irish people already crowded out of the country’s housing market, or unable to get a hospital appointment.
The Irish government has become accustomed to confusing its feelings for good governance, in part because it seldom faces serious consequences for doing so. This is because, as the commentator John McGuirk has argued elsewhere, the Irish state has abdicated its most serious functions: it handed the EU control of its monetary policy, and is planning to shift responsibility for its borders over to Brussels by signing up to the EU Migration Pact. And the buck-passing does not stop there: Europe dictates Ireland’s trading customs; Britain ensures its national security; and American race and gender dogmas have been imported by Irish elites to fill the spiritual void left by state-run Catholicism.
So what’s left in the intray? Small, relatively low stakes decisions. This frees up much time for vanity projects – like seeking out more refugees and holding wide-eyed progressive referendums. And as a result the Irish establishment has created a serious problem – which has pitched its tents right on their lawn.
The government has in recent months been forced to play whack-a-mole with migrant camps that keep cropping up in central Dublin. Last week, a tent city was demolished outside Dublin’s International Protection Office (IPO). Its occupants were bussed to the outskirts of the city, but hundreds more arrived into the country days later and pitched up on the banks of Dublin’s Grand Canal.
The government changed tack – offering them money to leave the area, which is lined with the offices of tech giants including LinkedIn and Google. The migrants didn’t bite and stayed put. So the government bulldozed the camp last week, for the third time. This is set to become a regular occurrence as the government expects to move up to 250 asylum seekers from make-shift camps in the capital to better accommodation, which is yet to be found, each week.
Ireland’s liberal elites have for years talked and thought in platitudes about immigration: wanting to be the side of the angels at the expense of common sense. Now the problem has arrived on their doorstep, they are taking notice, but are still often unable to see the wood from the trees. An Irish immigration official recently suggested that “what no politician is willing to admit is that we can’t stop people arriving here because it would encourage people to support the far right”.
This is a direct inversion of the truth as I see it. It seems clear that Right-wing politics is gathering pace in Ireland for the same reason as it is across Europe: because people are frustrated with the numbers arriving and lack of border controls. But anti-logic of this kind is rife among Irish officialdom, whose budgets have grown in recent decades as their responsibilities have shrunk – leaving them with too much time and money on their hands.
Out of ideas, the government has decided more money is needed to solve the problem. It plans to spend €5 billion buying and building “state-owned accommodation” to house asylum seekers. This is expected to supply 10,000 beds over the next 20 years (under a third of what’s likely to be needed by the end of this year alone) and so is unlikely to dent the crisis.
Scratch beneath the surface and it is clear that Ireland’s immigration crisis is, in fact, a crisis of decadence among the country’s liberal elite.