Una Mullally: State prefers rich Americans to struggling Irish

If anyone was wondering how Fine Gael’s Charlie Flanagan was going to mark the second anniversary of his ill-advised pitch to commemorate the Royal Irish Constabulary, we were given our answer last week.

Flanagan is asking questions about how to protect the futures of our people. How can they live fulfilled lives in Ireland? How can we accommodate those who want to live here and thrive here?

These are questions we are all asking ourselves right now, as the housing crisis designed by Flanagan’s party continues to destroy lives and decimate futures.

But it’s not young people in this country Flanagan and Fine Gael are seeking to support, protect, accommodate and offer a future to. No, a new priority for Flanagan is securing the futures of wealthy US citizens.

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Flanagan’s latest wheeze is to develop a scheme for US citizens to retire in Ireland, to work here in their middle age and later age, and to buy property here, in a housing market where an affordable home is already totally beyond the reach of young people who don’t come from familial wealth.

Speaking in the Dáil last week, Flanagan pontificated about creating an “enhanced package of measures on immigration” targeted at US citizens, jimmying with income criteria, pathways to citizenship, a bespoke residency scheme and amendments to work-permit schemes, so that Americans can move to Ireland and live out their dreams in the old country.

The housing crisis designed by Flanagan's party continues to destroy lives and decimate futures

Why in God’s name (which I’m sure the primary endorsers of this wheeze, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, would never take in vain) are we wasting time on foolhardy plans like this, when people who grow up in Ireland can’t even stay here? I don’t think any of us should apologise for pointing out the fact that there is far more talent among our young people in this country right now – which is being rejected by this government, whose message to young people is: sling yer hook – than we can gain from inviting older Americans to live in Ireland.

Conservative gatekeepers

Regarding immigration law itself, in 2018, when he was minister for justice, Flanagan ruled out giving children actually born in Ireland to foreign-national parents automatic citizenship after three years, saying such a move “amounts to bad law”.

So is it good law then, to reform our immigration system to suit one cohort from outside the country, in the hope that this will clock up Fine Gael some points with Irish-American lobbyists such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians?

We know that it’s usually Sinn Féin that cosies up to conservative Irish-Americans, because there’s plenty of fundraising to be done. Perhaps Flanagan is seeking to enhance Fine Gael’s relationship with these conservative gatekeepers.

Back in January 2020, when Flanagan was smarting over the foreseeable (unless you’re in Fine Gael) reaction to the failed and deeply flawed Royal Irish Constabulary commemoration, he gave a defensive statement attempting to justify the totally disconnected framing of Ireland’s past that embarrassed the then-government, his party, and coloured the chaotic outset of Fine Gael’s disastrous general election campaign that year.

The approach to the decade of centenaries, Flanagan said, “has made clear that there is no hierarchy of Irishness”. But there is a hierarchy of Irishness, clearly, and it’s a hierarchy that Flanagan’s party in government has embedded with incredibly destructive consequences. That hierarchy is about how young people in this country are totally disregarded, how their lives have been made so difficult, and how Fine Gael has ensured emigration is now the only response a lot of young people can have to the ills Fine Gael has created.

Fulfilled lives

What’s so heartbreaking is that, for generations, young Irish people emigrated for economic reasons, and because there were no job opportunities here. But now there are job opportunities, but the housing crisis is so awful, the simple need for shelter overrides that. For decades, young Irish people also emigrated because of social conservatism and oppression, and many people – particularly LGBT people – could not live fulfilled lives here and sought to do so elsewhere.

Fine Gael has ensured emigration is the only response a lot of young people can have to the ills Fine Gael has created

Young people in this country spent the recession fighting for social change, and achieved that with the marriage equality and abortion referendums, meaning people did not have to be so oppressed by the State. Yet Fine Gael found a new way to reject talent and creativity, and force people out no matter how much they tried to make the country better for everyone, through delegating the State’s responsibility to providing people with affordable homes to private developers and investment funds that have done the opposite.

Fine Gael has failed young people. They don’t care about young people. They’ve broken housing to the point of chaos and disarray, and stood idly and blithely by while the capital has been in a state of cultural collapse and managed decline, underpinned by the housing crisis, terrible development, and the destruction of cultural spaces.

It is criminal that young people in Ireland are being forced out because they cannot afford to rent a room in the country they grew up in. Maybe focus on that, instead of developing policy that is of no relevance to people in this country trying to make a life for themselves.

It’s almost as if the Government doesn’t want young people to stay here because perhaps on some level – even within their myopia – they understand that should young people stay, it’s not young people who won’t have a future, it’s Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.