Can’t lay blame for housing scandal at door of refugees..
LET’S have a bit of a reality check. Blaming Ukrainian refugees for Ireland’s housing crisis is a bit like blaming Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus for not being able to get into a Bethlehem B&B.
We can lay a lot of bad stuff at the door of Mad Vlad Putin, but your nephew not being able to buy a semi-d in Gort is not one of them.
And to the people saying “Ireland Is Full”, for the love of all that is holy, have a look at some basic facts, and some history.
Ireland is the only country in the developed world that still has a smaller population now than it did in the mid-19th century.
At one stage, our total population had halved, while the rest of the world was booming.
Before 1845 or so there were 8.5 million of us. By 1901, there were 4.4 million.
The potato blight followed by decades of huge immigration (maybe six million left in the half-century during and after that catasmeant trophe) Ireland has been way below what the popushould lation have been.
There’s literally no
other country in the developed world that saw anything like that and we were not caught up in two World Wars.
Anybody who travels outside of Dublin, especially to parts of the Midlands and the West will tell you Ireland is anything but “full”.
Ireland has one of the lowest population densities in Europe, we’re up there with the Scandinavian countries, most of which are basically ice fields populated by four lads called Erik and herds of moose. However, and here’s where you can make an argument, while
Ireland has done a lot to welcome refugees fleeing a terrible war, what kind of help will we be giving them if we invite them in and then let them end up homeless or in tents?
And in the wider issue of refugees – what’s going to happen if reception centres and similar are only sited in deprived or inner city areas, and not in the posher communities.
The areas who might talk a good game about “welcoming” but would rather it wasn’t so close to their lovely schools and expensive houses?
A lot of Irish politicians love to be seen to be doing the “right thing” especially by the EU and foreign leaders in general.
The danger here is in trying to be Ireland of the “Thousand welcomes” we over-promise and under-deliver and end up failing people fleeing war in the most basic way possible.
It would be far better for the Ukrainians who need a sanctuary to have an Ireland that’s honest with them, that does what we can rather than what we would like to do.
Our housing crisis has now gone on for a decade or more and its historic roots go back to the founding of our state.
It wasn’t caused by immigrants or refugees. After failing their own people, Irish leaders shouldn’t fail refugees as well.