{"id":54929,"date":"2025-09-10T10:23:30","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T10:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/54929\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T10:23:30","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T10:23:30","slug":"fr-brendan-kilcoyne-is-right-as-was-keir-starmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/54929\/","title":{"rendered":"Fr Brendan Kilcoyne is right, as was Keir Starmer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ireland\u2019s liberal media is on the warpath against a popular Mayo priest who dared to suggest<\/a> that the government is failing to manage immigration properly, and more shocking still, who suggested that it is easier for a Christian country to integrate Christian immigrants!<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is further proof that Ireland lags behind other countries, in particular our nearest neighbour, which is now in the process of waking up while Ireland\u2019s elite still sleeps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of all the information contained within the British Prime Minister\u2019s landmark summer speech on immigration \u2013 mostly ignored by the Irish political class<\/a> \u2013 Keir Starmer\u2019s description of the damage caused to social cohesion by mass immigration was the most startling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unless strict rules were restored within the immigration system, Starmer said that Britain would \u201crisk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Concerns about large-scale immigration often revolve around services and overall capacity: people wonder if there will be enough school places; or whether it will become harder to get a GP appointment; or about the impact on the availability of housing; and so forth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An equally important consideration relates to community cohesion and social capital: meaning the relationships which exist between people and which ultimately allow societies to function.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What happens to a country when sharp cultural differences emerge within its borders? Countries like Britain, France and Germany already know the answer to this, but has the Irish government begun to consider the impact which their decisions will have in the long-term?<\/p>\n

A healthy society is one where people generally trust their neighbours, and where they work with others on a continuous basis through community groups, sporting organisations, religious congregations and so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When it comes to documenting the value of community, Harvard\u2019s Professor Robert Putnam is the world\u2019s foremost authority, and his book \u2018Bowling Alone\u2019 remains influential.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This, and the fact that Putnam is a progressive who supports the US Democratic Party, makes Putnam\u2019s warnings about the impact of ethnic diversity on social trust all the more remarkable.<\/p>\n

Having carried out extensive research on this issue, Putnam waited many years before publishing his full findings in 2007.<\/p>\n

While maintaining that immigration had a positive effect on societies overall, Putnam made clear that there were real short-term costs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the short run\u2026immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to \u2018hunker down.\u2019 Trust (even of one\u2019s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer,\u201d Putnam stated.<\/p>\n

When examining communities across the United States, Putnam\u2019s research team found that in the more diverse areas, respondents were: less trusting of government; less likely to work on community projects; and less likely to volunteer or give to charity. They also tended to have fewer close friends and a lower quality of life.<\/p>\n

Putnam would return to this issue when he co-authored \u2018The Age of Obama: The Changing Place of Minorities in British and American Society\u2019 in 2010.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Closely observing Britain\u2019s recent transformation into a multi-racial society, Putnam and his co-authors found evidence of a similar tendency in which community-mindedness scores fell for both white and minority Britons living in the most diverse communities.<\/p>\n

It is easy to imagine how this situation plays out in the real world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Imagine an 80-year-old woman who is a native of Birmingham. During her lifetime, she will have seen her city change from being one populated almost entirely by people of English lineage, to become a city where whites are a minority, and where almost one in three residents is a Muslim.<\/p>\n

As a child, this hypothetical Brummie only heard English spoken, but now her local streets are multilingual. While her neighbours used to be people much like herself, now they differ from her distinctly in dress, appearance, mannerisms, culture and belief.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is easy to see why such a person would feel less trusting in a city which no longer resembles the home she grew up in, to the point of decreasing social interaction. As Putnam puts it<\/a>, \u201cdiversity seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ireland\u2019s demographic change<\/a> is advancing quickly, but the social science research on community participation has not kept pace with this.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is hard to say precisely how community involvement has been affected by immigration so far, but the European Commission\u2019s research showing that Ireland has the highest rate of loneliness within the EU should have set off alarm bells.<\/p>\n

With some Irish areas already experiencing a transformation on a scale similar to that of Birmingham, we need to think of ways in which we can promote community participation and thus maintain social cohesion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In \u2018The Age of Obama,\u2019 Putnam and his co-authors put forward some interesting suggestions about practical ways to bring people from different backgrounds together: supporting social clubs of various kinds; making it cheaper and easier to learn English; and locating sports, youth or recreational facilities in areas where they are likely to attract people from different races.<\/p>\n

Ireland will need to think of its own approach \u2013 indeed, the Programme for Government includes a commitment to develop a National Migration and Integration Strategy.<\/p>\n

Political correctness is likely to make drafting an effective strategy much harder. It is an inconvenient fact that immigrants from Poland and other Christian European nations proved relatively easy to assimilate 20 years ago, particularly when compared with the influx of arrivals from the Muslim world in recent times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A key insight of the renowned Oxford economist Sir Paul Collier, outlined in his book \u2018Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World,\u2019 is that when different diaspora groups are absorbed into the population at different speeds, this has a major impact on the size of the respective immigrant communities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Using Poles and Bangladeshis in the UK as a hypothetical example, Collier suggested that a slower process of assimilation among Bangladeshis resident in the UK would increase the size of the Bangladeshi community, and therefore make it more attractive for more of their compatriots to join them in Britain. Slow integration encourages even more additional immigration, because\u00a0 the \u201ccosts of migration fall as the size of the network of immigrants who are already settled increases.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Prioritising immigration from countries which are more culturally similar to Ireland could make a huge difference when it comes to making immigration a success, and we should not be shy about doing this.<\/p>\n

The media\u2019s shameless attacks<\/a> on Fr. Brendan Kilcoyne for stating the blindingly obvious should be ignored, and a sensible policy of encouraging the kind of immigration which has been successful (like recruiting more Filipino nurses) should be pursued.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Beyond that, there needs to be a heightened focus on encouraging newcomers to participate actively in Irish life, starting from the earliest age possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Increasing the participation of children from migrant backgrounds in the GAA should be a key priority \u2013 it is unfortunate that a generation on from the beginning of large-scale immigration, so few high-profile GAA stars have migrant backgrounds \u2013 along with efforts to promote Irish culture more broadly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018Community\u2019 should become the watchword in all policy discussions. Devolving powers downwards from national to local government could also be beneficial in reaching and supporting community groups on a local level.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet no matter what policies we pursue and no matter how hard we try, one inconvenient fact will still remain: it is much, much easier to integrate people who are similar to how we the Irish are.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is Polish immigration worked a generation ago, as did the waves of immigration from other Christian countries (Catholic nurses from the southern state of Kerala and their families have been a tremendous addition, for example).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fr. Brendan Kilcoyne has the courage to stare reality in the face and speak honestly. The campaign by liberal journalists to silence him is beneath contempt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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