There is a question that hovers over Irish politics: what will the parties of power do when they start to panic about losing it? Last week, after their joint debacle in the presidential election, we got the grim answer: turn on immigrants.
One of the reasons the far right has been less potent in Ireland is that most mainstream politicians have been responsible in their utterances on immigration. The Government parties have not followed their centrist counterparts in other countries by trying to compete on the terms set by ethnonationalist reactionaries. Until now.
Last week, the Tánaiste Simon Harris said: “Our migration numbers are too high, and I think that is really an issue that needs to be considered in a very serious way by Government. One of the reasons I think they are so high is that there are too many people who come to this country and are told they do not have a right to be here, and it is taking too long for them to leave the country.”
On any ordinary understanding of language, Harris was saying that failed asylum seekers who have not yet been deported make up a very significant proportion of what he considers to be excessive inward migration. And by any ordinary understanding of honest public discourse, this is dangerous nonsense.
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It so obviously absurd that I assumed at first that Harris had, as the Americans say, misspoken – he surely just mangled his words. But the following day, his most senior colleague Pascal Donohoe agreed with what Harris had said. And Fine Gael TD Barry Ward said his leader’s comments had been “measured and absolutely factually correct. He has identified the fact that we do have massive pressure on our migration system, there’s no disputing that”.
If migration is too high, non-deportation has damn all to do with it. The connection between the claim and the evidence is utterly spurious
Ward, like Harris, referred to “migration” rather than “asylum”. Both men could have said – with rational justification – that there is great pressure on the asylum system. They didn’t – they said that the problem is with migration. And they did this in a “measured” (calculated and deliberate) way.
Just over 125,000 people came to Ireland in the 12 months up to April this year. Of these, 31,500 were Irish citizens returning from abroad. Let’s assume that these Irish returnees do not count in Harris’s “too much” – so we’re talking about an annual influx of around 94,000 migrants from other countries.
On the other side of this equation, 2,403 deportation orders were signed in 2024. Of these 1,116 people departed the State, mostly voluntarily – so 1,287 people were, in Harris’s terms, “told they do not have a right to be here” but failed or refused to “leave the country”.
Thus, failed asylum seekers who have not yet left the country make up less than two per cent of annual inward migration. To put it another way, if all the failed asylum seekers had been deported, the number of non-Irish immigrants would have fallen from 93,800 to 92,600.
[ Simon Harris is walking a risky tightrope on immigrationOpens in new window ]
If migration is too high, non-deportation has damn all to do with it. The connection between the claim and the evidence is utterly spurious.
Almost everyone agrees that it is reasonable for the State to help people who have been judged not to have the right to asylum to leave – and to speedily deport those who refuse to do so voluntarily. So the issue here isn’t really about deportation or indeed about the asylum system itself. It’s about the once and future Taoiseach spreading disinformation on immigration. (He might read the Department of the Taoiseach’s own website which warns against disinformation, which it defines as “something published or shared to deliberately mislead people”.)
His disinformation is a deliberate confusion of two very different questions. Fine Gael has decided to use the existence of a small number of people awaiting deportation as proof that inward migration as a whole has become “too much” – a classic far-right reality distortion technique in which a minor and unrepresentative section of foreign-born people is made to represent the whole.
This is a three-card trick. The first card is inward migration – the approximately 94,000 people coming into Ireland. The second card is the number of people who seek asylum in Ireland: 18,560 last year. The third is the small proportion (seven per cent) of those who were refused asylum and were awaiting deportation: 1,287.
The trick is to switch the cards and make the 1,287 stand for the whole 94,000. Why? Because it sends the none too subtle message that the whole 94,000 “do not have a right to be here”.
This is disgraceful duplicity. Simon Harris knows very well that the overwhelming majority of inward migrants have a literal and legal right to be here. More than 25,000 of the 94,000 are EU citizens who have the same right to live and work in Ireland as we have to live and work in their countries. Nearly 5,000 were UK citizens, who likewise have the mutual entitlements we share on these islands.
This leaves around 63,000 people coming in from non-EU and non-UK countries. Some of these people are Ukrainians who have been given refugee status. The vast majority of the rest are here on student visas or work permits. Those in the latter category range from construction workers to hospitality staff to nurses and doctors to specialists brought in by multinational companies.
So how many of these people does Harris believe to be too many?
He could, certainly, send home the 20,000 students from India, the US, China and Canada – thus triggering the financial implosion of most of Ireland’s third-level institutions.
He could outrage the multinationals by telling them they can’t bring in those electronic engineers and pharma scientists. He could cause a crisis in the health and social care systems coming into the winter by blocking the importation of more nurses and doctors and care workers.
But of course Fine Gael doesn’t want to do any of these things. It just wants to point and shout, “Over there! Don’t look at us! Look at them!”
