Over the past year anti-immigration sentiment has been fanned by far right parties and the Government. Brian O’Boyle reviews the tactics used to scapegoat migrants for government failures and argues for principled anti-racist politics in the upcoming election.
Simon Harris became the Irish Taoiseach in April 2024, when he replaced Leo Varadkar as leader of Fine Gael (FG). At the time, the Government was floundering in the polls, and with Local and European elections just weeks away, Fine Gael knew what their new leader had to do – he had to seize the initiative away from Sinn Féin by ‘getting tough’ on immigration.
Dog Whistles
Within a month, Harris had informed the Dáil that the government would no longer tolerate asylum seekers gathering around the International Protection Office (IPO) in Dublin city centre. Insisting that “we do not live in a country where makeshift shanty towns are just allowed to develop”, he vowed to clear the encampment on Mount Street and to criminalise anyone who continued to remain there.
In the same week, the Justice Minister, Helen McEntee, declared that 80% of asylum seekers were making their way into Ireland from the North. This was a second dog whistle designed to play a game of ‘pass the parcel’ with asylum seekers fleeing the racist British regime.
For years, the Conservatives had attempted to cover their own austerity agenda by scapegoating migrants and threatening to deport them to Rwanda. Now McEntee was legitimising this disgusting policy by implying that the British threats were driving asylum seekers across the Irish border.
In response, the Irish Government promised ‘emergency legislation’ to send them back. And to make sure that the public fully got the message, Harris sent out his Junior Ministers to insist that Ireland would fine airlines that allowed asylum seekers to come to the state without the required paperwork. The International Protection Act (2015) dictates that Ireland must allow people to claim asylum once they reach the jurisdiction, so Harris wanted the population to know that it would do everything in its power to keep them out in the first place.
‘Busy Fools’
Ukrainian refugees were also in the firing line. The Irish elites initially responded to Putin’s invasion through the lens of their own geo-political interests. They knew that America would use the war as a recruiting tool for NATO in Europe so they sought to chip away at Irish neutrality by underlining their total support for ‘Putin’s victims’. Denouncing Putin as a war monger, they initially promised Ukrainian refugees far more than other international protection applicants were entitled to receive. But with an election looming and seeing an opportunity to deflect attention from their own policy failures, the government now claimed that they had given Ukrainians far too much and that this was acting as a magnet for people coming to our shores.
The unifying strand through each of these policies was a racist attempt to make immigration the primary issue in the upcoming elections, and in-so-doing, to disrupt the momentum of Sinn Féin (SF). For the previous two years, SF had remained the most popular party in the state by attacking the government for their failures around housing. This strategy had helped to keep the pressure on the domestic establishment but thanks to the ‘busy fools’ on the Irish far right, the government were able to shape the final weeks of the election campaign around immigration, asylum seekers and refugees.
The Centre Shifted Rightwards
Until the rise of the domestic far right, Irish political discourse was dominated by the Government’s ongoing failures around housing. The opposition parties in Dáil Éireann are generally to the left of the Government, and they had successfully framed the housing crisis as a consequence of allowing landlords, vulture funds and developers to profit off people’s misery. This narrative was responsible for a continuous decline in support for the establishment parties from 2020-2023, but Sinn Féin never put their energy into a radical social movement that could demand real changes on the streets.
Instead, they hoped that their dominance of Dáil speaking time, and a suite of alternative policy solutions would carry the day in the next election. But this left space for others to mobilise and this mobilisation largely happened around asylum seekers and refugees. Where housing and healthcare had been the dominant issues up to the middle of 2023, asylum seekers and immigration gradually gained in political prominence. Most people still refused to view the world through the racism of the far right but when its activists insisted that ‘Ireland is full’ or that ‘we need to look after our own first’ they began to chime with the genuine concerns of people living through a 15 year long austerity agenda.
The entire political spectrum gradually shifted to the right, allowing conservative parties to move right while still presenting themselves as the ‘decent centre’. They have become more extreme on immigration, but the presence of the far right has not only helped to mask this shift, it has given credence to the idea that the government remains in the middle and that it is neither right nor left. For their own part, the far right have been so extreme that they have placed themselves largely on the margins. As well as claiming that Ireland needed to ‘look after its own’, the far right insist that Ireland is being ‘invaded by military aged men’, that there is a shadowy ‘replacement of the indigenous population’, that ‘asylum seekers are an occupying force equivalent to the Israeli war machine’ and that violence and threats, burning down buildings and intimidating asylum seekers are the most effective methods of doing politics.
These more extremist ideas have rightly repulsed most of the Irish electorate, but they have simultaneously allowed the conservative establishment to present itself as the acceptable face of Irish racism – to take advantage of the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and present themselves as ‘tough but fair’ on immigration. The example of Mount Street is a case in point.
Dog Whistling Again
In December 2023, the Irish Government decided to defy the European Charter of Human Rights by refusing to provide all asylum seekers with adequate accommodation in the state. Citing the extraordinary pressures associated with the influx of Ukrainians, the Government insisted that they would no longer be in a position to offer accommodation to non-Ukrainian men who came to Ireland looking for asylum.
A tented encampment, mounting rubbish, far-right intimidation, local anxiety and a general shift in the public mood were the inevitable consequences, as thousands of men tried desperately to remain safe while being forced to live in tents on the streets. This was a powerful symbol of the wider narrative being pushed by the far right. It screamed to the Irish people that immigration was becoming increasingly out of control, and yet in the six months in which the tents and the misery were allowed to accumulate, there had actually been a radical fall in the number of Ukrainians coming into Ireland. Figures compiled by the Irish Times confirm that the number of Ukrainians entering the state fell by 70% in the early months of 2024 to the point where more Ukrainians were leaving the system than coming into it.
The Department of Children confirmed that they now had 3,100 additional beds, for example, but to house the desperate men living around Mount Street would be to send a dangerous signal that Ireland would once again respect its humanitarian commitments under international law. Instead, the Government allowed these men to function as a powerful signal that desperate people were no longer welcome in the state, before rounding them up as a reactionary signal that the government was getting tough on immigration.
From Housing to Scapegoating
When Harris made his “makeshift shanty towns” comment, he was deliberately lying. The Government had allowed a very visible shanty town to develop in order to deter desperate people from coming into Ireland and now it was going to scapegoat these people in the context of an upcoming election.
This largely did the trick as the campaign became dominated by pessimism around immigration, while the Government could present itself as the happy medium between the unacceptable far right racists and ‘do-gooders’ on the left who wanted to give the foreigners far too much.
Over the last few weeks, SF has become embroiled in a series of scandals that have thrown the party into turmoil, but the initial damage was done in the months leading up to the last election when a progressive focus on ‘housing for all’ was gradually replaced by a reactionary debate about the dangers of immigration.
The Irish elites explained this shift as the inevitable consequence of housing tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, but the real causes go back to the deeply unequal nature of Irish capitalism and to the Government’s decision to move closer to NATO in the context of the Ukraine war. Asylum seekers could have been treated humanely; they could have been integrated and properly supported; but instead, the Government sat back while the far right grew and prospered and then swooped in when immigration became the major issue in the election.
The Next Election
For all of these reasons we need principled socialist candidates in the next election and beyond. We need candidates who will stand clearly against any attempts to scapegoat asylum seekers, refugees and migrants whether these come from the rotten far right or from a government looking to deflect from their own failures to support people. Ireland is one of the richest countries in the world. There is more than enough for everyone to live a decent life with dignity and support, but it will need principled fighters to lift the expectations of the electorate and to fight with them for concrete resources – for health centres, schools and social housing. We therefore need socialists now more than ever. We need fighters who will build hope and resistance rather than slipping into the fear and pessimism that benefits both sides of the Irish right.
Our ability to lift people’s expectations will help to decide whether the next five years are full of scapegoating and racism from the government and the busy fools of the Irish far right – or whether, the left can drag the political agenda back towards concrete issues such as health, housing, education and decent work.
