The Government started talking tough on migration the moment it lost control of the narrative. Its rhetoric is not matched by action, however. Since last spring it has been clear that large numbers of Ukrainians would arrive, needing our help. Some 55,000 have. More than 13,000 other nationals came seeking refugee status. It is an unprecedented influx on top of a housing and a cost-of-living crisis. It is now going to be an election issue, beginning with the local and European elections next year. This is when Ireland fits into the European mainstream, and that’s a pity.
There was a taste of this here in the early noughties, but it lacked the speed dial of social media and there wasn’t a similar set of concentric crises. The 2004 citizenship referendum reset the narrative and ensured that, unlike elsewhere, there was a welcome for immigration and some concern for asylum seekers. That nearly 20-year-old settlement is in danger of coming unstuck. If it does, the consequences shouldn’t be taken lightly.
The question is not why migration is centre stage now but why it took so long to get there. Part of the answer is Sinn Féin. It rallied those in society who wanted to shout and shake their fists. Rough and ready, it was the perfect party of protest. The antipathy of the establishment reinforced its credentials at the edge. What horrified the respectable, reassured the rabble. Unbeknown to themselves, however, their followers were marching towards the political centre. Sinn Féin was doubly useful. It mopped up the feral underbelly of Irish society, recycled it as peaceful protest, while refusing – at the top, at any rate – to play the race card. Hard on economic issues, it aspired to a cosmopolitan nationalism. In creating a comfort zone for the houseless children of the middle class and some of their parents, it froze out those who wanted to burn the house down.
It is not an accident that Sinn Féin is the object of more ire from those leading marches on the street than any other party. It is partly competition for a shared constituency, albeit for completely different purposes. It is also realisation that Sinn Féin is not what they thought it was, even if the wider establishment still thinks it is exactly that. This is that party’s conundrum. Since the 1990s it has shed unwanted layers for support, from dissident republicans to feral nationalists. It has grown its base, spread towards the centre and is in touching distance of power. But its internal coalition is fragile and if government is to be attained, its electoral margins are tight.
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The migration genie is out of the bottle because of a convergence of events. The domestication of the preferred party of protest is one reason. The mistaken view by the main parties in government that it could contain this issue is another.
On the outside there seems to be something called government. On the inside it is a warren of silos connected by semaphore and seldom much more. Occasionally it can be galvanised, and Covid-19 is a stellar example. But on migration, there was no call to arms within. This column pointed out last April that there was a political imperative for an overriding structure to deliver what business as usual cannot. It wasn’t an original idea then, and has been ignored since.
There was a straightforward political calculation. A Fianna Fáil taoiseach calculated correctly that housing was the imperative political issue. He was wrong in thinking that migration could be politically contained. The imperative in that scenario was to insulate Housing for All, the government’s housing plan, from responsibility for housing migrants. That was siloed into the Department of Children, which has responsibility for integration. Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman’s request to Cabinet colleagues more than a week ago, urgently seeking buildings to accommodate refugees, was met with silence. Ministers are licensed to stand back. A Fine Gael Taoiseach now has dialled up the rhetoric, but O’Gorman’s department lacks the means, and so far Leo Varadkar has failed to sequester the resources.
In the 1990s the Irish story transformed from 150 years of mass emigration to immigration. Living in Dublin’s north inner city since, with the highest density of immigration in the state, I believe we are a lucky generation. Ten days ago accompanying a relative in the emergency department of Wexford Hospital, what was bad would have been worse were it not for immigrant health workers. If we have a housing crisis in an economy with full employment, who will build on the scale required, if not immigrants? If our public services run on the largesse of corporation tax, immigrants are an essential part of the talent that delivers for us. In a country that is ageing faster than it procreates, every immigrant of working age is a valuable wealth creator.
If migrants are a mainstay of our economy, they are invisible in our politics. We need a refugee process that is fair and fast. We need bold strategies instead of piecemeal tactics. This is seeping from the edges towards the centre. The antidote is to reject that we are victims of invasion, or afraid of bogey men. Belatedly we need a substantial plan and based on it, we must take back our own national narrative.