Anti-immigrant mobs have lots of spare time
THE rapid reaction times of antiimmigrant protesters is impressive. No sooner does word go out to local representatives of the impending arrival of single male migrants to the local vacant hotel/friary/nursing home/ holiday village than the activists snap into action.
Protests are mounted practically overnight, 24-hour rosters are drawn up to make sure that the building is safeguarded against unwanted arrivals around the clock, and Facebook pages are set up to live-stream the action while demonstrators diligently post their opprobrium and complaints on social media platforms like TikTok and X. Talk about efficiency.
Outside the old Capuchin Friary in Carlow town, which was originally earmarked to host 50 international protection applicants but will now – thanks to a swift Government U-turn – accommodate women and children, a tricolour waved in the air, along with a placard bearing the legend ‘Irish Lives Matter’. Local delivery men ferrying supplies into the property were jeered as traitors and scumbags and suffered intimidatory tactics like having their vehicle registration numbers jotted down in notebooks or captured on cameraphones.
IN Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo, a weekend-long protest in freezing temperatures saw another plan to house single men, this time in the disused JJ Gannon’s hotel on Main Street, substituted by a plan for women and children. Cheers went up when local organiser Michelle Smith announced the good news and the protesters dispersed, some to complain on social media later about being vilified by more hardcore confreres as Judases and sellouts to the cause.
Meanwhile the protest in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, against the conversion of the town’s only hotel into an asylum seeker centre for 160 people, grinds on. Placards bearing messages such as ‘Roscrea is Full’ or ‘Roscrea Has Done Enough’, propped up against the entrance to Racket Hall Hotel on the outskirts of the town, make clear the hardline attitude that prevails in some sections of North Tipperary.
Expletive-filled rhetoric is often a feature of these gatherings, and the nasty atmosphere is unsavoury, but the protests are essentially peaceful. People are entitled to express their opposition to policies they disdain, while in communities where services like school places and health facilities are stretched, the antagonism is understandable, if not entirely predictable.
But like the immediate availability of gangs of youngsters for a looting and rioting spree in Dublin city on the night a child was stabbed outside her school at Parnell Street, the protesters’ readiness to answer the siren call of anti-immigrant ringleaders at a moment’s notice is startling.
For most of us, any unexpected departure from our normal routine – be it answering the command to attend jury duty or a health emergency – is a logistical nightmare, necessitating a flurry of ad hoc arrangements and leaning on friends and neighbours.
We must ask our bosses for Unwelcoming: Protester’s sign over plan to house single men time off work or find someone to fill in for us. We must find someone to mind the children or pick them up from school.
Yet these protesters have so much time on their hands that they can commit, at the drop of a hat, to manning blockades for days on end and demonstrating outside premises, with no end in sight. They can’t all be between jobs, or on a gap year from college, or on annual holidays. It’s quite likely that many are jobless and dependent on welfare supports such as social housing, medical cards and jobseeker’s benefit.
There is no shame in being poor – any one of us can fall through the cracks of the State’s safety net – but in an era of full employment there is no excuse for anyone who doesn’t suffer ill health or disability to be bone idle and looking for a purpose.
ATRUISM of anti-immigration rhetoric is that most refugees or international protection applicants are not escaping war or tyranny at all but are in fact low-skilled economic migrants in search of a better life for themselves and their families.
But if that is really the case, and if they are industrious and willing to work to that end, then shouldn’t there be a system of visas to allow refugees to work when they arrive here and while they attempt to secure their legal status, rather than having them hanging around reception centres all day long?
The economy needs workers to fill the labour gaps left by Irish people who are unwilling or overqualified to take on the grunt work that was performed by previous generations.
The paradox of most anti-immigrant feeling is that it emanates from those who share most with immigrants, namely a dependence on the public purse for their livelihood, or on unskilled labour.
It means that while antiimmigrant protesters don’t want migrants to benefit from taxpayer-funded entitlements, neither do they want them to have the jobs they turn their noses up at, which would make them economically independent.