How do you know our rulers are spoofing? A cynic might say the tell is that they have their mouths open. But being sweet-natured, I would suggest two sure signs. One is that they are posing as persecuted truth-tellers. The other is that they are implying they will do something they will never actually do – take on major power centres in the Irish economy. On both counts, the Government is clearly spoofing about migration.
A big thing has happened in Irish public life in the last month: the Government has decided there are too many migrants coming to live in Ireland and that the growth in our population must be slowed. It is not obvious how this momentous decision has been reached or what detailed studies lie behind it. But both Tánaiste Simon Harris and Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan have explicitly announced this momentous shift in national strategy.
It’s a shift saturated in spoofery. The first tell is Harris posturing as Honest Simon beset by “pathetic” people trying to “shut down ... debate”. This combination of self-pity and self-aggrandisement is familiar from the allegedly anti-elitist mode of right-wing populism.
Let’s be clear: Ireland needs a genuine debate about migration. But debate is not sloganeering. It’s not verbal gesturing. It’s not resort to sweeping generalities. It’s not peddling disinformation. It is serious engagement with tangible realities.
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Deciding to reduce migration is perfectly legitimate. One may or may not agree with it, but it is a government’s duty to make these big decisions about the future of the country. The only problem is that it’s also a government’s duty to say why it has come to this decision and how it is going to act on it. And here the rest is silence.
So far, the Government might as well have announced that Ireland is too damn wet, that we can’t cope with the floods and that the amount of rainfall has to be reduced. Except that while complaining about the weather is a harmless national pastime, complaining about immigration is assuredly not harmless.
What is especially damaging is the deliberate confusion of immigration and asylum. The Government wants to discourage asylum seekers and speed up the deportation of those who fail to be granted the right to remain here. This is in itself a reasonable subject for debate. But 90 per cent of immigrants are not asylum seekers. They are people who come here to work or study.
In the second category, Government could cut the 30,000 visas it issues to language schools. But it also reiterated last week its desire to make Ireland “a hub for international students”, so presumably those reductions would be nullified by increases in the number of foreign students attending Irish universities.
That leaves us with the workers. Any genuine debate about whether there are “too many” immigrants and how to cut their numbers has to start with the facts about the Irish labour market. Where, exactly, does it have an over-supply of workers?
Let’s be a little crude and say that Ireland has two roughly equal economies, one bourgeois and one proletarian. Both have serious labour shortages.
In the first economy, the bourgeoisification of the Irish workforce is a remarkable phenomenon. In a mere five years (2019-2024) we have increased the number of professionals and “associate professionals” by a third and the number of managers by 25 per cent. In real terms that is an extra 262,400 professionals and managers – a new Cork and new Galway of experts and technocrats.
Last year, of the almost half a million new hires by Irish employers, close to half (44 per cent) were filled by people with third-level qualifications. In 2023 (the latest year for which we have this figure) more than half of all Irish job vacancies advertised online were for high-skilled professionals. This is what a knowledge economy looks like.
It is undoubtedly true both that this success creates more demand for housing and that many of these new jobs are being filled by migrants. Let’s therefore imagine the Government is serious about putting a halt to this particular gallop.
To do so, it needs to have a big showdown with two very large power centres. One is the multinationals whose corporate tax revenue (and whose well-paid employee’s PAYE) the Government so delights in spending. The other is the health service that sucks up much of that spending.
The pharmaceutical and medical device sectors have big demands for more scientists, engineers and technicians than Ireland can produce. And the part of the export economy most dependent on migrants is ICT – 37 per cent of all those employed in ICT jobs in Ireland are not Irish nationals. So here’s the question: is the Government going to tell Pfizer and Eli Lily and Microsoft and Apple to feck off somewhere else if they want more international workers because we have “too many” already? No it isn’t.
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Meanwhile, a quarter of all work permits issued in 2024 were for healthcare professionals. So, equally, is the Government going to tell everybody in Ireland who ever uses the health services that they can feck off too if they think there are going to be enough nurses and doctors to treat them?
As for the other, proletarian, half of the workforce, I look forward to a Government that capitulated so supinely to the demands of the hospitality sector for a VAT cut telling the same lobby that it can’t have chefs, waiters, cleaners and reception staff, all of whom remain in high demand. And to similar messages going to out to employers in agriculture and food processing – not to mention Fianna Fáil’s old friends in the construction industry being told that they can’t bring in people to build the vast number of houses and the major infrastructure projects we are promised.
Of course the Government isn’t going to risk upsetting any of these interests. It is just sitting on a barstool moaning about the demographic weather.
