Surely it’s subjective. There’s nothing to say that we need to be as densely populated as Europe
Besides, environmentally it makes no sense to move people from a low impact way of living to a high impact wasteful one.
We should be working on reducing populations works wide, but in particular in industrialized societies
Saying that Ireland is ‘full up’ is not far-right though: everyone across the political spectrum, if they’re being honest with themselves, can see that our absurdly high rate of immigration is unsustainable.
Mainstream parties could take take the wind out of the sails of nascent far-right parties by publicly committing to cool off immigration. Most proposals would be broadly welcomed by all sectors of society- but if politicians continue to ignore the issue, or double-down in their support of high immigration however, then people would increasingly turn to the far-right as they feel they have no other options, or if hey feel that they aren’t being taken seriously enough
Edit: I don’t know what it is about the subject of immigration specifically, but fairly otherwise sensible left-wing people who say that capitalism can’t keep seeking growth in a finite world, suddenly change course when entertaining the fact that high immigration is a part of this unsustainable growth and start defending it?
It’s disingenuous to say it’s just the far right who have issues with the amount of people coming into the country. The problem is we don’t have the housing/health/education spaces available for all these people. Immigration should be slowed until such time as we have the infrastructure to support it.
Omg it’s now far right to say that Ireland has a overpopulation problem like why……….. People just want to be able to afford house or even have the option of getting an apartment it’s horrible but they’re right I’ll just go line up in a 150 person queue for an apartment and try think of something else
All this freely available and affordable accommodation we have wouldn’t necessarily agree
I don’t think this has anything to do with political spectrum though.
Also, Ireland doesn’t really have a “far right” with any political representation or power whatsoever. There are the few loonies, but that’s about it.
Honestly this sort of sounds like a kite flying exercise to get ahead of some backlash for housing allocation or a report or something in the pipeline.
Something may be about to be announced and they’re flying the “It’s racist and far right to object to this” kite out in front.
So if you think or say Ireland has a overpopulation problem you’re far right now? Ok, makes complete sense.
Far right, fascist, nazi, all these words have lost their meaning now. Same with incel etc. Basically anyone who doesn’t agree with someone from the other side is now known as all of the above. It’s crazy.
“Stop pointing out facts you fucking nazi!”
The left in the media, along with our own politicians have made it so that anyone that is of the belief we are not able to provide housing, education, transport, health services for the people here right now, nevermind bringing more people in, are racist and far right.
I love how we can just label opposing views as far-right and be done with it, no explanation or accountability required
Don’t bother arguing with me far-right trolls lol
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Does everything have to be about right wing this, left wing that. How about just discuss a topic on its own merits without being tribalistic about it.
I don’t know about the far right but plenty of people on this sub are pretty adamant we are full.
Far right is now the catch all term for “things” i don’t like…. it used to be confined to idiots online… but lately politicians and journalists have been pushing it too.
There is nothing responsible or moral about such behaviour.
There’s a conflation here. Ireland might not be full, but many of our services are at capacity. Hospital waiting times, school class sizes, school transport, public and private housing, etc all. Just because the country could take more doesn’t mean it can take more right now. Pointing to how we had 8,000,000 people here in the 19th century is all well and good but unless Fintan wants people to live in huts and subsist on a half acre of lumper potatoes he can’t ignore that the state of our public services isn’t some right wing red herring.
Fintan is a relic of the Dublin centric elite that have pushed the country into the place we are now. Most of the political elite think like him. They have views that are hard to reconcile to reality. He hates the IRA but loves the peace process. Loves immigration as long as it isn’t too close to them. Left wing as far as it doesn’t effect their taxes or pensions.
They use the same discredited arguments that immigrants pay for themselves, or dont affect wages which is not fully true or the truth is more complicated. Properly managed immigration is massively beneficial. But it has to be properly managed.
There’s a lot of people of his class in government. Make no mistake they consider anyone who has any view on immigration as some sort of far right racist. The fact that now Irish students can’t even get accommodation or a place in University since universities are incentivized to entice wealthy oversea students is mental.
Other countries in Europe are experiencing serious problems from immigration and exactly because people like Fintan considered anyone who had an opinion slightly opposed to him to be a alt right.
Sweden went from being the most liberal nation in Europe on this subject to nearly electing the old fascist party. Specially because they suppressed any honest debate. I think Ireland’s going to be the same way because we are too uncomfortable to voice it.
Current building model we’re absolutely full up. We can’t keep permanently removing farm land to build shite housing estates.
I think it’s disingenuous to say we are full up, rather than a fallacy. We are in many ways full, but it’s because the government have chosen not to invest in public housing, not to invest in services, not to invest in towns and transport links that would ease the pressure on Dublin.
We probably don’t have the ability to take more people unless they are super rich but it’s not because we don’t have the resources, we are choosing not to use them.
Look I dunno much about it but wouldn’t the housing market, rents, hospital waiting lists etc show we are full for now? If we had better people running the place and better planning and facilities then of course bring people in but letting people in and not improving everything else obviously can’t work?
Fintan O’Toole is the classic example of the D4/D6 elite with their luxury beliefs. Comfortably middle class with own home and a professional job. He doesn’t have to rub shoulders with immigrants and compete for houses or jobs. That’s for working class people, so by broadcasting his beliefs he is showcasing his status. Worst of all, when people do have real concerns he belittles them as uneducated racists. You’d swear he’s been asleep for the past 6 years and didn’t notice how Brexit happened or how Trump got in power.
Do we even have a legitimate far right in Ireland? I mean, do they have any elected official’s.
The term has been used as a slur to discredit anyone who holds pro-nationalist anti-unlimited immigration views. It is noteworthy that many of the people who label others as being far right and not really negatively affected by immigration. They already own a house, many use private healthcare and are not affected by the longer public waiting lists etc.
Then there is the virtue signalling imbeciles back up their viewpoints because they sound good and don’t really give any deep thought to the matter.
The whole subject has become totally polarised and rational well thought out and expressed arguments have gone totally out the window.
He correctly says that our population is lower now than before the famine….. Great, where are the houses, where is the public infrastructure. It would take close to a decade to build the necessary stuff. And with the well organised lefty, green contingent of serial planning objectors. It will probably take longer to get anything meaningful built.
The war cannot go on forever, eventually, there will have to be some sort of peace accord. The war migration will stop, remember back in 2007-ish when there was ghost estates all over the country. One economic downturn, with a fall in migration and the something similar will happen again.
As usual, Fintan is playing to his crowd.
That headline really is just emblematic of a bigger problem and that’s that you are fundamentally unable to talk about controversial social issues without people trying to out you as a bigot, racist, xenophobe, etc. It just results in one party trying to shut down the conversation and ignore the issue.
Ireland is only “full-up” in the sense that there are now serious issues in a number of very important areas such as education, housing and health which are being exacerbated by immigration. Immigrants are not to blame for these issues though, and only a genuine bigot would say immigrants are in fact the cause of this. The cause of this is government failings over many years to address these issues.
We are by no means “full-up” in the sense that there is genuinely no more space for these people. Ireland isn’t that densely populated of a country and there is still vast areas of land that could be used for building accommodation.
Our Muppet government are creating the conditions that will lead to a far right party in the Dáil.
I don’t understand the argument here. So we don’t have people stuffed into every nook and crannie available means we should. There’s huge issues with public transport, housing, education and health care. Typical observation from someone who probably doesn’t have to worry about any of the things I just mentioned. Discussion probably came up over a dinner party. Pleb
What the hell is he on about.
We are full. Hotels are housing refugees. Student accommodation is housing refugees to the point that _students_ are missing placements. Campsites are hosting refugees ffs.
Let Fintan put the poor and unfortunate of the world up in his guest room if he’s so concerned. For now, until we build a couple of extra _towns_ full of houses, _Ireland is most definitely full_.
I don’t really care about immigration, I just want good public services and affordable housing
So when the government ask citizens to give up rooms in their homes for students and refugees because there is nowhere for them. What’s that then ?
Is Fintan O’Toole one of those “reporters” that does the whole, well I have a home and can afford my rent whats everyone complaining about.
Ah the ol’ “Call if far-right so we can ignore it”
Full article for those who are curious and are behind the paywall:
*”Ireland, at the moment, feels like one of those trick houses they used to have at fun fairs, where the space and the furniture are arranged so that you feel small in one room, huge in the next. The country messes with our spatial awareness because it manages to be both half-empty and overcrowded,both capacious and claustrophobic.*
*On the one hand, even though the population is growing rapidly, Ireland remains one of the least densely populated countries in Europe. Think of Ukraine and what comes to mind, apart from the obvious horrors, is wide open spaces, the endless steppe, the wheat fields stretching to the horizon. Ukraine has a mere 75 people per square kilometre.*
*But Ireland has even fewer: 73. This is half the density of Denmark, a third that of Germany, a quarter that of Britain.*
*We all know why — Ireland is still recovering demographically from the Great Hunger and from generations of mass emigration.In so many parts of the island, you are still reminded by ghostly ruins and remnants that there used to be an awful lot more of us around.*
*But the optical illusion is that Ireland is simultaneously congested, as if the infamous excuse for emigration given by the Fianna Fáil minister Brian Lenihan in the 1980s — “We can’t all live on a small island” —has somehow become true. Our trick house manages to feel both underpopulated and jammed to capacity.*
*This contradiction is, in some respects, a product of dizzying success. Last week’s figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) told us that there are now 2.6 million people in paid employment in Ireland.That’s 400,000 more than were at work in the same period just two years ago. It’s 800,000 more than a decade ago.*
*The dark side of this positive story is that successive governments have failed to keep up with this expansion of both population and the economy.*
*This growth has not been smooth or even. But I find it remarkable to reflect that, if I live a normal lifespan, the population of the State I die in will be twice that of the country I was born in.*
*The dark side of this positive story is that successive governments have failed to keep up with this expansion of both population and the economy. Public infrastructure and public services have not expanded fast enough — in some crucial cases, like the building of social housing, they have actually shrunk.*
*The irony of the recent commemorations of the deaths of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith is that those men thought they were founding a state whose population would be vastly greater than the one we have a century later. Griffith was convinced that “Ireland out of her own riches could support 20 million of a population”. Here we are, with riches far beyond anything he could have imagined, yet struggling to support a population a quarter that size.*
*Hence the sense of overcrowding: homes still full of adults who can’t afford to move out, pokey apartments shared by too many people,overstuffed buses and trains on commuter routes, overfull doctors’ waiting rooms, 10,000 patients a month left waiting on trolleys in teeming hospitals,up to 40 children packed into some primary school classrooms.*
*Hence too the strangeness of a place that has lots of space but little room. The country (relative to the size even of the population) is big. But the State is way too small.*
*What does this doubleness mean for Irish politics? Aptly, it has two contradictory implications.*
*One of them is progressive. The State simply can’t be run from the right. It has to expand, even to be able to service a booming capitalist economy. A growing private sector needs to be supported by a growing public sector.*
*Right now the conservative doctrine of shrinking the State would look mad even to a US multinational corporation investing here. The centre ground of Irish politics has to be social democratic.*
*The increasingly chaotic efforts of the State to house both Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers from other countries feed the toxic lie of a country too cramped to contain all these people.*
*The neo-Thatcherism to which our neighbours across the Irish Sea are about to subject themselves has no purchase here. Even Fine Gael could not dream of it.*
*But that encouraging truth exists on the level of rational politics. There is another, much darker and more dangerous implication.*
*The State’s failures make Ireland feel like it’s bursting at the seams, even though it isn’t. They make plausible, through daily experience,the false notion that Ireland just has too many people.*
*This is, of course, the trope of the far right across much of Europe and the US. Donald Trump says “our country is full up”. (The US is the 146th most densely populated country on earth.) Hungary is “overrun” by immigrants, says Viktor Orbán. We’re being “swamped” say the neo-fascists everywhere.*
*The far right is still very small in Ireland but in recent weeks asylum seekers have had to be moved from accommodation in Finglas and in Kinnegad because of threats and orchestrated smears. The increasingly chaotic efforts of the State to house both Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers from other countries feed the toxic lie of a country too cramped to contain all these people.*
*The risk for Ireland is that the very thing the State (and I think the nation) has long desired — a return to something like a normal population level — can be twisted into a threat.”*
I hate this kind of stuff. If you say the country is struggling to cope with the number of immigrants we have arriving, then you must be far right. It is a fact that we can’t provide accommodation at a reasonable price to those of us who already live here. It is a fact that our health service, our schools, and other public services are also struggling for the same reason (and others, in fairness), and pointing this out does not make me or anyone else far right or anti-immigrant.
You’re on the far right if you think it’s a shit idea to take in refugees we can’t house
What’s that? You want to be able to find a house? Okay, nazi bigot.
Fintan O’Toole likes to express opinions on subjects he knows very little about. History, economics, sociology, he jumps right in regardless. His books are full of the same type of highly undeveloped arguments.
Talking about controlled immigration is not being far right. Agree, types of Ben Gilroy, Gemma O are far right to the core however Fintan and his types love labelling concerned people.
Look I agree there was a lot of horrible, racist bollocks in the Ireland is full hashtag, but when we don’t have enough houses to home people, that kinda is the definition of full.
When we give people Visas to come here, knowing full well that they won’t be able to find a place to live, the government is failing these people and dooming them to a bad situation. We cannot restrict EU migration, but we need to restrict non-EU migration until we actually have homes to go around.
The elephant in the room is that nativism and racism simply are *not* the same thing, despite concerted efforts from so many movements over the last few decades to synonymise them incorrectly in the public discourse.
You absolutely can be a nativist without being a racist. I wouldn’t agree with nativism myself for the most part but I know many people who do, and they are *not* racists. They simply believe that in a time of shortage, the existing population should be looked after before anyone else is allowed to join that population from outside and be looked after as well.
It’s not racist because it’s not based on race or ethnicity *at all*. Most of these people couldn’t give a flying fuck about what race, religion, gender etc another person is, it’s more about the idea of allowing people to move to this country and attain citizenship at a time when the existing citizenry’s resources are already stretched to breaking point.
By framing it as an issue of racism, Fintan and those who follow his line of thinking are attempting to shut down any debate whatsoever on the merits or demerits of looking after one’s own first – essentially, they are assuming globalisation as an automatically good, accepted status quo and refusing to allow any other viewpoints.
It’s one of the things that always pisses me off so, so, so much about debates over immigration. Case in point, if racism was responsible for a lot of these peoples’ opposition to immigration, then why are they also condemning our welcoming of white Eastern Europeans from Ukraine? Why do they condemn the birthright citizenship of people immediately descended from Irish Americans? Etc?
I just find it incredibly frustrating. Like it or not, Nativism and tribe mentality are hard-coded into the human DNA, it’s extremely recently in our geological timeline that we’ve moved away from that as a necessary way of life – so to condemn anyone who expresses such views even in the most mild or moderate terms as “racist” is, frankly, absolute bullshit.
Again, I don’t at all approve of nativism myself. But it’s insane that so many are trying to make it an entirely socially unacceptable ideology when it has, for millennia, been at the very core of how humans organised themselves into societies to begin with.
Gaslighting again. Full up and essential services at capacity are two very different things.
I would probably agree that country is at capacity. Hospital waiting lists are more than 2 years in some cases, if you can even get a place and they don’t just fob you off with admin to keep the list down. There is fuck all housing. I don’t think that’s immigrants fault at all. It’s politicians. I think it’s only far right if you blame immigrants for our problems and suggest they should leave. Immigrants are just as much victims of FFG mismanagement and corruption, as I am.
>This country is one of the least densely populated in Europe
Immediately disregarded entire article. what a shite argument
so what if it’s not densely populated? why should it be?
I’m not far right. I wont ever be right, let alone far right. I think a massive majority of their talking points are insane, especially from the Americans.
But it’s not some far right dogwhistle to acknowledge the blatant fact that our country’s services can barely support us as is. It’s unethical to try and bring more people in to compound on top of a broken system.
Hospital waiting lists bollocksed healthcare in general unless you go private, housing crisis, cost of living crisis, possible collapse of any sort of worthwhile public pension, awful public transport. We are absolutely near if not past capacity and that has nothing to do with the nationality of people coming in. I absolutely believe that immigration is a perfectly fine thing and that it should be allowed but right now we can barely even support what we have, it makes no sense to invite people in until we fix our own issues.
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Surely it’s subjective. There’s nothing to say that we need to be as densely populated as Europe
Besides, environmentally it makes no sense to move people from a low impact way of living to a high impact wasteful one.
We should be working on reducing populations works wide, but in particular in industrialized societies
Saying that Ireland is ‘full up’ is not far-right though: everyone across the political spectrum, if they’re being honest with themselves, can see that our absurdly high rate of immigration is unsustainable.
Mainstream parties could take take the wind out of the sails of nascent far-right parties by publicly committing to cool off immigration. Most proposals would be broadly welcomed by all sectors of society- but if politicians continue to ignore the issue, or double-down in their support of high immigration however, then people would increasingly turn to the far-right as they feel they have no other options, or if hey feel that they aren’t being taken seriously enough
Edit: I don’t know what it is about the subject of immigration specifically, but fairly otherwise sensible left-wing people who say that capitalism can’t keep seeking growth in a finite world, suddenly change course when entertaining the fact that high immigration is a part of this unsustainable growth and start defending it?
It’s disingenuous to say it’s just the far right who have issues with the amount of people coming into the country. The problem is we don’t have the housing/health/education spaces available for all these people. Immigration should be slowed until such time as we have the infrastructure to support it.
Omg it’s now far right to say that Ireland has a overpopulation problem like why……….. People just want to be able to afford house or even have the option of getting an apartment it’s horrible but they’re right I’ll just go line up in a 150 person queue for an apartment and try think of something else
All this freely available and affordable accommodation we have wouldn’t necessarily agree
I don’t think this has anything to do with political spectrum though.
Also, Ireland doesn’t really have a “far right” with any political representation or power whatsoever. There are the few loonies, but that’s about it.
Honestly this sort of sounds like a kite flying exercise to get ahead of some backlash for housing allocation or a report or something in the pipeline.
Something may be about to be announced and they’re flying the “It’s racist and far right to object to this” kite out in front.
So if you think or say Ireland has a overpopulation problem you’re far right now? Ok, makes complete sense.
Far right, fascist, nazi, all these words have lost their meaning now. Same with incel etc. Basically anyone who doesn’t agree with someone from the other side is now known as all of the above. It’s crazy.
“Stop pointing out facts you fucking nazi!”
The left in the media, along with our own politicians have made it so that anyone that is of the belief we are not able to provide housing, education, transport, health services for the people here right now, nevermind bringing more people in, are racist and far right.
I love how we can just label opposing views as far-right and be done with it, no explanation or accountability required
Don’t bother arguing with me far-right trolls lol
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Does everything have to be about right wing this, left wing that. How about just discuss a topic on its own merits without being tribalistic about it.
I don’t know about the far right but plenty of people on this sub are pretty adamant we are full.
Far right is now the catch all term for “things” i don’t like…. it used to be confined to idiots online… but lately politicians and journalists have been pushing it too.
There is nothing responsible or moral about such behaviour.
There’s a conflation here. Ireland might not be full, but many of our services are at capacity. Hospital waiting times, school class sizes, school transport, public and private housing, etc all. Just because the country could take more doesn’t mean it can take more right now. Pointing to how we had 8,000,000 people here in the 19th century is all well and good but unless Fintan wants people to live in huts and subsist on a half acre of lumper potatoes he can’t ignore that the state of our public services isn’t some right wing red herring.
Fintan is a relic of the Dublin centric elite that have pushed the country into the place we are now. Most of the political elite think like him. They have views that are hard to reconcile to reality. He hates the IRA but loves the peace process. Loves immigration as long as it isn’t too close to them. Left wing as far as it doesn’t effect their taxes or pensions.
They use the same discredited arguments that immigrants pay for themselves, or dont affect wages which is not fully true or the truth is more complicated. Properly managed immigration is massively beneficial. But it has to be properly managed.
There’s a lot of people of his class in government. Make no mistake they consider anyone who has any view on immigration as some sort of far right racist. The fact that now Irish students can’t even get accommodation or a place in University since universities are incentivized to entice wealthy oversea students is mental.
Other countries in Europe are experiencing serious problems from immigration and exactly because people like Fintan considered anyone who had an opinion slightly opposed to him to be a alt right.
Sweden went from being the most liberal nation in Europe on this subject to nearly electing the old fascist party. Specially because they suppressed any honest debate. I think Ireland’s going to be the same way because we are too uncomfortable to voice it.
Current building model we’re absolutely full up. We can’t keep permanently removing farm land to build shite housing estates.
I think it’s disingenuous to say we are full up, rather than a fallacy. We are in many ways full, but it’s because the government have chosen not to invest in public housing, not to invest in services, not to invest in towns and transport links that would ease the pressure on Dublin.
We probably don’t have the ability to take more people unless they are super rich but it’s not because we don’t have the resources, we are choosing not to use them.
Look I dunno much about it but wouldn’t the housing market, rents, hospital waiting lists etc show we are full for now? If we had better people running the place and better planning and facilities then of course bring people in but letting people in and not improving everything else obviously can’t work?
Fintan O’Toole is the classic example of the D4/D6 elite with their luxury beliefs. Comfortably middle class with own home and a professional job. He doesn’t have to rub shoulders with immigrants and compete for houses or jobs. That’s for working class people, so by broadcasting his beliefs he is showcasing his status. Worst of all, when people do have real concerns he belittles them as uneducated racists. You’d swear he’s been asleep for the past 6 years and didn’t notice how Brexit happened or how Trump got in power.
Do we even have a legitimate far right in Ireland? I mean, do they have any elected official’s.
The term has been used as a slur to discredit anyone who holds pro-nationalist anti-unlimited immigration views. It is noteworthy that many of the people who label others as being far right and not really negatively affected by immigration. They already own a house, many use private healthcare and are not affected by the longer public waiting lists etc.
Then there is the virtue signalling imbeciles back up their viewpoints because they sound good and don’t really give any deep thought to the matter.
The whole subject has become totally polarised and rational well thought out and expressed arguments have gone totally out the window.
He correctly says that our population is lower now than before the famine….. Great, where are the houses, where is the public infrastructure. It would take close to a decade to build the necessary stuff. And with the well organised lefty, green contingent of serial planning objectors. It will probably take longer to get anything meaningful built.
The war cannot go on forever, eventually, there will have to be some sort of peace accord. The war migration will stop, remember back in 2007-ish when there was ghost estates all over the country. One economic downturn, with a fall in migration and the something similar will happen again.
As usual, Fintan is playing to his crowd.
That headline really is just emblematic of a bigger problem and that’s that you are fundamentally unable to talk about controversial social issues without people trying to out you as a bigot, racist, xenophobe, etc. It just results in one party trying to shut down the conversation and ignore the issue.
Ireland is only “full-up” in the sense that there are now serious issues in a number of very important areas such as education, housing and health which are being exacerbated by immigration. Immigrants are not to blame for these issues though, and only a genuine bigot would say immigrants are in fact the cause of this. The cause of this is government failings over many years to address these issues.
We are by no means “full-up” in the sense that there is genuinely no more space for these people. Ireland isn’t that densely populated of a country and there is still vast areas of land that could be used for building accommodation.
Our Muppet government are creating the conditions that will lead to a far right party in the Dáil.
I don’t understand the argument here. So we don’t have people stuffed into every nook and crannie available means we should. There’s huge issues with public transport, housing, education and health care. Typical observation from someone who probably doesn’t have to worry about any of the things I just mentioned. Discussion probably came up over a dinner party. Pleb
What the hell is he on about.
We are full. Hotels are housing refugees. Student accommodation is housing refugees to the point that _students_ are missing placements. Campsites are hosting refugees ffs.
Let Fintan put the poor and unfortunate of the world up in his guest room if he’s so concerned. For now, until we build a couple of extra _towns_ full of houses, _Ireland is most definitely full_.
I don’t really care about immigration, I just want good public services and affordable housing
So when the government ask citizens to give up rooms in their homes for students and refugees because there is nowhere for them. What’s that then ?
Is Fintan O’Toole one of those “reporters” that does the whole, well I have a home and can afford my rent whats everyone complaining about.
Ah the ol’ “Call if far-right so we can ignore it”
Full article for those who are curious and are behind the paywall:
*”Ireland, at the moment, feels like one of those trick houses they used to have at fun fairs, where the space and the furniture are arranged so that you feel small in one room, huge in the next. The country messes with our spatial awareness because it manages to be both half-empty and overcrowded,both capacious and claustrophobic.*
*On the one hand, even though the population is growing rapidly, Ireland remains one of the least densely populated countries in Europe. Think of Ukraine and what comes to mind, apart from the obvious horrors, is wide open spaces, the endless steppe, the wheat fields stretching to the horizon. Ukraine has a mere 75 people per square kilometre.*
*But Ireland has even fewer: 73. This is half the density of Denmark, a third that of Germany, a quarter that of Britain.*
*We all know why — Ireland is still recovering demographically from the Great Hunger and from generations of mass emigration.In so many parts of the island, you are still reminded by ghostly ruins and remnants that there used to be an awful lot more of us around.*
*But the optical illusion is that Ireland is simultaneously congested, as if the infamous excuse for emigration given by the Fianna Fáil minister Brian Lenihan in the 1980s — “We can’t all live on a small island” —has somehow become true. Our trick house manages to feel both underpopulated and jammed to capacity.*
*This contradiction is, in some respects, a product of dizzying success. Last week’s figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) told us that there are now 2.6 million people in paid employment in Ireland.That’s 400,000 more than were at work in the same period just two years ago. It’s 800,000 more than a decade ago.*
*The dark side of this positive story is that successive governments have failed to keep up with this expansion of both population and the economy.*
*This growth has not been smooth or even. But I find it remarkable to reflect that, if I live a normal lifespan, the population of the State I die in will be twice that of the country I was born in.*
*The dark side of this positive story is that successive governments have failed to keep up with this expansion of both population and the economy. Public infrastructure and public services have not expanded fast enough — in some crucial cases, like the building of social housing, they have actually shrunk.*
*The irony of the recent commemorations of the deaths of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith is that those men thought they were founding a state whose population would be vastly greater than the one we have a century later. Griffith was convinced that “Ireland out of her own riches could support 20 million of a population”. Here we are, with riches far beyond anything he could have imagined, yet struggling to support a population a quarter that size.*
*Hence the sense of overcrowding: homes still full of adults who can’t afford to move out, pokey apartments shared by too many people,overstuffed buses and trains on commuter routes, overfull doctors’ waiting rooms, 10,000 patients a month left waiting on trolleys in teeming hospitals,up to 40 children packed into some primary school classrooms.*
*Hence too the strangeness of a place that has lots of space but little room. The country (relative to the size even of the population) is big. But the State is way too small.*
*What does this doubleness mean for Irish politics? Aptly, it has two contradictory implications.*
*One of them is progressive. The State simply can’t be run from the right. It has to expand, even to be able to service a booming capitalist economy. A growing private sector needs to be supported by a growing public sector.*
*Right now the conservative doctrine of shrinking the State would look mad even to a US multinational corporation investing here. The centre ground of Irish politics has to be social democratic.*
*The increasingly chaotic efforts of the State to house both Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers from other countries feed the toxic lie of a country too cramped to contain all these people.*
*The neo-Thatcherism to which our neighbours across the Irish Sea are about to subject themselves has no purchase here. Even Fine Gael could not dream of it.*
*But that encouraging truth exists on the level of rational politics. There is another, much darker and more dangerous implication.*
*The State’s failures make Ireland feel like it’s bursting at the seams, even though it isn’t. They make plausible, through daily experience,the false notion that Ireland just has too many people.*
*This is, of course, the trope of the far right across much of Europe and the US. Donald Trump says “our country is full up”. (The US is the 146th most densely populated country on earth.) Hungary is “overrun” by immigrants, says Viktor Orbán. We’re being “swamped” say the neo-fascists everywhere.*
*The far right is still very small in Ireland but in recent weeks asylum seekers have had to be moved from accommodation in Finglas and in Kinnegad because of threats and orchestrated smears. The increasingly chaotic efforts of the State to house both Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers from other countries feed the toxic lie of a country too cramped to contain all these people.*
*The risk for Ireland is that the very thing the State (and I think the nation) has long desired — a return to something like a normal population level — can be twisted into a threat.”*
I hate this kind of stuff. If you say the country is struggling to cope with the number of immigrants we have arriving, then you must be far right. It is a fact that we can’t provide accommodation at a reasonable price to those of us who already live here. It is a fact that our health service, our schools, and other public services are also struggling for the same reason (and others, in fairness), and pointing this out does not make me or anyone else far right or anti-immigrant.
You’re on the far right if you think it’s a shit idea to take in refugees we can’t house
What’s that? You want to be able to find a house? Okay, nazi bigot.
Fintan O’Toole likes to express opinions on subjects he knows very little about. History, economics, sociology, he jumps right in regardless. His books are full of the same type of highly undeveloped arguments.
Talking about controlled immigration is not being far right. Agree, types of Ben Gilroy, Gemma O are far right to the core however Fintan and his types love labelling concerned people.
Look I agree there was a lot of horrible, racist bollocks in the Ireland is full hashtag, but when we don’t have enough houses to home people, that kinda is the definition of full.
When we give people Visas to come here, knowing full well that they won’t be able to find a place to live, the government is failing these people and dooming them to a bad situation. We cannot restrict EU migration, but we need to restrict non-EU migration until we actually have homes to go around.
The elephant in the room is that nativism and racism simply are *not* the same thing, despite concerted efforts from so many movements over the last few decades to synonymise them incorrectly in the public discourse.
You absolutely can be a nativist without being a racist. I wouldn’t agree with nativism myself for the most part but I know many people who do, and they are *not* racists. They simply believe that in a time of shortage, the existing population should be looked after before anyone else is allowed to join that population from outside and be looked after as well.
It’s not racist because it’s not based on race or ethnicity *at all*. Most of these people couldn’t give a flying fuck about what race, religion, gender etc another person is, it’s more about the idea of allowing people to move to this country and attain citizenship at a time when the existing citizenry’s resources are already stretched to breaking point.
By framing it as an issue of racism, Fintan and those who follow his line of thinking are attempting to shut down any debate whatsoever on the merits or demerits of looking after one’s own first – essentially, they are assuming globalisation as an automatically good, accepted status quo and refusing to allow any other viewpoints.
It’s one of the things that always pisses me off so, so, so much about debates over immigration. Case in point, if racism was responsible for a lot of these peoples’ opposition to immigration, then why are they also condemning our welcoming of white Eastern Europeans from Ukraine? Why do they condemn the birthright citizenship of people immediately descended from Irish Americans? Etc?
I just find it incredibly frustrating. Like it or not, Nativism and tribe mentality are hard-coded into the human DNA, it’s extremely recently in our geological timeline that we’ve moved away from that as a necessary way of life – so to condemn anyone who expresses such views even in the most mild or moderate terms as “racist” is, frankly, absolute bullshit.
Again, I don’t at all approve of nativism myself. But it’s insane that so many are trying to make it an entirely socially unacceptable ideology when it has, for millennia, been at the very core of how humans organised themselves into societies to begin with.
Gaslighting again. Full up and essential services at capacity are two very different things.
I would probably agree that country is at capacity. Hospital waiting lists are more than 2 years in some cases, if you can even get a place and they don’t just fob you off with admin to keep the list down. There is fuck all housing. I don’t think that’s immigrants fault at all. It’s politicians. I think it’s only far right if you blame immigrants for our problems and suggest they should leave. Immigrants are just as much victims of FFG mismanagement and corruption, as I am.
>This country is one of the least densely populated in Europe
Immediately disregarded entire article. what a shite argument
so what if it’s not densely populated? why should it be?
I’m not far right. I wont ever be right, let alone far right. I think a massive majority of their talking points are insane, especially from the Americans.
But it’s not some far right dogwhistle to acknowledge the blatant fact that our country’s services can barely support us as is. It’s unethical to try and bring more people in to compound on top of a broken system.
Hospital waiting lists bollocksed healthcare in general unless you go private, housing crisis, cost of living crisis, possible collapse of any sort of worthwhile public pension, awful public transport. We are absolutely near if not past capacity and that has nothing to do with the nationality of people coming in. I absolutely believe that immigration is a perfectly fine thing and that it should be allowed but right now we can barely even support what we have, it makes no sense to invite people in until we fix our own issues.