XPost: alt.politics.economics, alt.politics.immigration, alt.society.liberalism XPost: talk.politics.guns

On 28 Mar 2022, pothead <potheadbjoe@gmail.com> posted some news:t1tj1l$38qa3$95@news.freedyn.de:

The lazy immigrants have no skills and do not want to work for
anything they get. They want everything handed to them and they
accept no responsibility for the wrongs they do.

Republican voters are turning against Sinn Fein as they reject the
party’s open borders stance

Ireland’s anti-immigration backlash has spiralled into country-wide
unrest. Protests, arson attacks and hardening anti-immigration views
have transfused Irish politics with a fervour not seen since the
Troubles.

I went to Ireland to make a documentary for The Telegraph to find out
what Irish people make of the growing strife.

I started my journey in Dublin, where hundreds of people turned out for
an anti-immigration march. Amid a sea of Irish tricolour flags,
protestors chanted “get them out” about the government over its support
for mass migration – which many felt was conferring already sparse
housing and public services to foreigners, to the detriment of Irish
citizens. One woman said she was scared to leave the house because of
the amount of “unvetted male people” who’ve arrived in Ireland in recent
years.

The Irish government were not the only villains of the event – much ire
was directed at “higher powers’’, variously the European Union and the
World Economic Forum. Leo Varadkar’s trip to Davos last month when anti-immigration protests across the country reached a high-point no
doubt did little to disabuse them of the impression that his priorities
lie elsewhere. Some gripes were flagrantly conspiratorial: Mr Varadkar’s government, not known for its Anglophilia, was accused multiple times of
being in thrall to King Charles.

Demonstrators also belted “Ireland is for the Irish” and other slogans
which would usually be the preserve of the republicans of Sinn Fein. But
the party’s support for mass migration has alienated their Irish
nationalist base, with many at the march branding them “traitors”.

To find out more about where the anger is coming from, I travelled to
Roscrea, a sleepy town in County Tipperary, where locals have been
protesting for three weeks outside of the town’s only hotel – closed
down last month after the government struck a deal with its owner to
house more than 160 asylum seekers there. Mary-Claire Doran, a Roscrea resident, told me the town had been transformed by an influx of around
1,000 refugees in recent years, swelling the town’s population of 5,000
by 20 per cent.

Unlike in recent years in Britain and continental Europe, immigration
has never been a dominant issue in Irish politics ahead of an election.
But the surge in asylum seekers arriving in Ireland has catapulted it to voters’ number one concern, with most of the Irish public now in favour
of tougher immigration controls, according to recent polls.

I discussed the political fallout with Ben Scallan, a journalist for
Gript, a media startup that has become a formidable challenger to the progressive orthodoxy espoused by the Irish government. “I think the
Irish government is primarily concerned with appearing to be a modern
European country,” Ben said. “They admire their European colleagues;
they admire Scandinavian countries like Sweden which are progressive and
very trendy.”

Ben said he was baffled that the Irish government was repeating the
blunders of its European neighbours by ramping up mass migration, with
little consideration for the dissenting views of the Irish public. “It
seems like having seen the failure of that policy in countries like
Sweden, Germany and France, they want to replicate it for some reason
that I don’t really understand.”

Protests against the government’s immigration policy have been mostly
peaceful, but some have turned violent – including in Dublin last year
where riots broke out after three young children and a woman were
stabbed, allegedly by a man of Algerian origin. There has also been a
spate of more than a dozen arson attacks in Ireland over the past year
on migrant facilities and venues wrongly thought to be housing migrants.

The Irish state last year accepted more refugees than it could
accommodate, forcing the government to offer asylum applicants tents and sleeping bags as they arrived in Dublin. Since the Russian invasion,
nearly 100,000 Ukrainians have also been offered sanctuary in Ireland. I
spoke to one Ukrainian refugee outside of an asylum processing centre in Dublin, who told me that despite sleeping rough in Ireland, he was
nonetheless grateful for refuge from Vladamir Putin’s forces in Ukraine.

The number of asylum seekers arriving into Ireland has shot up to more
than 26,000 over the past two years, the highest annual figures on
record, and a growth of nearly 200 per cent from 2019. Last year, most
asylum seekers arriving in Ireland came from Nigeria, Algeria,
Afghanistan, Somalia, and Georgia.

There are some TDs who have spoken out against “unsustainable” levels of immigration in the Irish parliament. Six of them have formed a loose
coalition called the Rural Independent Group. I sat down with one of
their members, Carol Nolan, to hear their side of the story. “I have
never seen the feeling as strong on the issue of immigration as it is
now,” Ms Nolan said. “I do feel that people will protest at the ballot
box and I do feel that if the government doesn’t change direction
quickly…that they will be punished.”

Ms Nolan said she felt anti-EU sentiment was being stoked by the
government’s immigration policy. “There is a lot of frustration over the
EU dictating everything a country should do – the numbers they should
take in and so forth. So there is definitely frustration over that
dictatorship as some people see it.”

Leo Varadkar’s government says it can tackle the problems around
immigration with better messaging and tougher laws to censor what it
deems as “hate speech”. But the Irish public say their concerns are
legitimate – a view which is becoming harder to ignore as it gains
political momentum. It’s beginning to look like the Irish government’s
vision of an Ireland which looks more like its European neighbours is
coming true – a multicultural country, ripe for a populist revolt.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/19/mass-immigration-bringing-eur opean-style-populism-ireland/?li_source=LI&li_medium=for_you

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