Ireland has been playing through the greatest hits of European immigration politics, but with the speed turned up to 5x.
On a date commemorating the anniversary of the Easter Monday Rising of 1916, an absolutely enormous anti-immigration protest was held in Dublin at the Garden of Remembrance, with a smaller counterprotest meeting it. Ireland has been playing through the greatest hits of European immigration politics, but with the speed turned up to 5x.
Ireland’s immigration issue is very different from America’s. In America, immigration is deeply connected with the rise of a subset of the middle class into upper middle class life. Immigration provides nannies, housekeepers, landscapers, and builders, and keeps restaurants cheaper than they otherwise would be.
Because of the way the Irish state houses, feeds, boards, and gives stipends to migrants and asylum seekers, the state is able to control where they land in Ireland physically. They typically park them among the poor. They aren’t putting them in the posh towns. It also means many of the migrants do not work, but loiter. When you hear of an Irish locality making itself famous for opposing this transformation, it’s usually a poorer one: “Coolock Says No.”
Taoiseach Micheál Martin expressed his usual disgust with the protestors and their negativity. “We don’t believe in narrow nationalism,” he said. “The message of the 1916 proclamation is an inclusive, internationalist vision, not one that is narrow. It never had at its core a narrow nationalism. It was very internationalist. It was inclusive, it was open.”
No it wasn’t. It was inclusive of anyone who wanted to break the connection with the United Kingdom. That included Protestants, it excluded Unionists. There is no internationalism in the 1916 proclamation, which is a straightforward articulation of Ireland’s old national story: that the badges of their national identity — their religion, their saints, their ancient national myths, their language, and their culture — were threatened by foreign rule and incursion. The movement of that era was internationalist insofar as it collaborated with other enemies of the British Empire. It was open, in that, on the cultural front, it saw Gaelic revival as something that also belongs to speakers of Welsh, Breton, and Manx.
In any case, Conor Fitzgerald writes wonderfully about the growing strength but felt futility of this national protest against mass immigration:
But in general the attitude of the Irish establishment towards this movement is becoming one of a zoo patron looking at an enraged lion from the other side of a very secure cage. It’s alarming, and it certainly gives you reason to reflect on what you did to cause this creature to bare its fangs. But multiple elections passing without incident have left them feeling certain that they are not about to be eaten alive. The deciding factor here is the affluent and aspirational middle-class, for whom stability, consensus and respectability are now and have always been the master values. That stance has been coupled with the inability of the anti-immigration movement to produce a leader or party that can shepherd change in an unfrightening way that brings the system along with them (such a thing might not necessarily be possible).
In other words, the final gate of the Irish system’s cordon sanitaire, the one that controls access to the system and to political decision making, is holding — and the people keeping together are not the media or politicians, but the respectable middle class. The result is that the scale and nature of these national marches are undeniably impressive but sort of illusory. Their growth represents a solidification of support amongst a certain type of disagreeable (in the big 5 personality trait sense) working- and lower middle class Irish person — and increasing confidence on their part in expressing dissent.
This is exactly right. The respectable middle class is not affected by this at all. I spent some time in a nice part of North County Dublin before Easter. Demographically, it could have been 1999 at the height of the Celtic Tiger. A few Polish families, a Hungarian barber. But otherwise no sign that nearly one-fifth of the state’s inhabitants are foreign born.