The Policy of Mass Immigration is Incompatible with Sustainable Housing

The most well-known political issue in Ireland today is the housing crisis. A crisis of an overcrowded rental and property market, with record breaking rip-off prices. A crisis exacerbated by the continued expansion of luxury tourist accommodation as opposed to standard living accommodation. And a crisis that has resulted in a figure of over 10,000 homeless people throughout the Republic of Ireland.

For a country with a birth-rate just below replacement level, one might naively think that housing here should actually be getting cheaper, not dearer. This is because in theory, houses passed on by a larger older generation to a smaller younger one should naturally create more supply in the market.

Yet our housing crisis reflects an exactly opposite state of affairs, that of miniscule supply and massive prices. And for some reason the liberal ideologues in our mainstream media cannot, or will not, explain why this is the case.

The issue of housing recently raised its head again in Dáil Éireann. The Social Democrats* raised a motion of no-confidence last Tuesday night against the Housing Minister, Eoghan Murphy. The motion was narrowly defeated by just three votes. When the motion failed, Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan extended his hand to congratulate Minister Murphy. Yet Minister Murphy refused to shake it. Why?

Could it have something to do with Minister Flanagan’s policy of mass immigration into Ireland?

Or was it his handing out of newly refurbished apartments to Georgian and Albanian asylum spoofers ‘fleeing’ from peaceful countries? 

Or was it his department’s admission that the 16 Kurds recently discovered in a freight container ‘are free to move around as they wish’, and have since gone missing?

Or is it that he allows failed asylum seekers to have ‘free’ accommodation and ‘free’ legal appeals here for years, all whilst the well-connected barrister class who represent them gouge millions from the public trough?

Or maybe it’s the fact that Minister Murphy could pour concrete over every last patch of Irish soil and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to the housing crisis until Minister Flanagan finally puts some stop to mass immigration. 

Whatever Minister Murphy’s gripe is with Minister Flanagan, we must realise that it is the Government’s policy of mass immigration which is at the root cause of the housing crisis.

The policy of mass immigration is not something the Irish people have ever openly discussed or asked for, yet we have it in place nonetheless.

Few people realise that Ireland now has one of the lowest native-born populations in the EU, and that the Irish themselves may very well become a minority in their own country by as soon as 2050. The fact that it is not publicly acceptable to be concerned about these figures is itself a cause for concern.

Logically the people coming here will need somewhere to live, and basic economic theory implies that a mass increase in the demand for accommodation, with only a minor increase in supply, translates into a major increase in price.

This can only be to the financial delight of Irish landlords, bankers and vulture funds, but to the lasting detriment of the Irish people in general.

As evidenced in a 2017 Prime Time documentary, many non-nationals in Ireland are quite willing to work and live in packed tenement squats. These squats are often normal houses that have been converted by cowboy landlords to host up to thirty people, cramming six into each available room. 

Many migrants live in such situations because they know Ireland has a soft-touch when it comes to immigration, and that after five years they can gain Irish citizenship and move onto greener EU pastures, such as the UK and Germany. 

In other words, Ireland exports many of the newly passportised ‘Irish’ once they have learnt their basic English, picked up a few professional skills, and have earned enough money to fly out of Ireland’s horrific rental racket. This means that Ireland can be viewed as a sort of open-air labour processing plant, producing skilled workers for our larger EU neighbours.

The proliferation of tenement squats and general overcrowding of the housing market means that young Irish people are now forced to stay in their family home for many additional years, often in a manner of delayed infancy. Some young Irish might pinch their nose and live independently in squalid conditions, or else pay exorbitant rents and only ever dream of owning a house. Worse still, many just become homeless and have to sleep rough.

The housing problem is exacerbated by the fact that local housing authorities lack the political will or power to clamp down on the dodgy operations of cowboy landlords. This is ostensibly because they do not wish to cause further homelessness.

A quick internet search on this matter is very revealing, with one headline reading: “Three-quarters of rental properties in Cork are failing to meet minimum standards”. “Despite this, no properties were deemed unsuitable for letting by the council.”

Clearly a complete top-down review is needed on the whole issue of housing and immigration, from the national level right down to the local level. However it seems that the Irish people are still nothing but complacent when it comes to politics, and so the situation will have to somehow get worse before it has any hope of getting better.

So how did we arrive at this point? Our situation can only be explained by acknowledging how the interests of property owners and financial elites fit perfectly into the blind-spot of the liberal ideologues occupying our NGO-State-Media establishment. 

This hand-in-glove establishment exists explicitly to discredit and silence anyone who questions the progressive dogma of equality, diversity and tolerance, and implicitly exists to serve the liberal axioms of free-markets, open borders and capital expansion.

Rather unwittingly, progressive liberals serve the will of Big Capital by allowing in waves of easily exploitable tenants and cheap migrant labourers to Irish shores. Their useful idiocy gives no second thought as to how this might negatively impact upon Irish life, and thinking in that way has long since been instituted as a thought-crime.

Such liberals then have to viciously guard their bad conscience by hysterically opposing anyone who criticises the policy of mass immigration. They tar them from the media pulpit as being far-right, racist, bigoted, xenophobic, extremist, etc.

Once tarred with such a brush, a person fears being marked for life, potentially forgoing their livelihood, losing friends and family who fear guilt by association, or eventually charged with hate-speech and being locked up for wrong-think.

The establishment’s sustained Project Fear on the immigration question has caused a crisis of courage within political discourse in Ireland. All of the legacy media’s pundits now parrot the same Party line: ‘diversity is strength, free-speech is hate-speech, careerism is peace’. 

The political class follows the same tune, excommunicating candidates like Verona Murphy for raising half-baked questions about asylum seekers and for failing to toe the PC line perfectly. 

One can only assume that many amongst them must be looking anxiously over their shoulders, fearful of their more zealous colleague-comrades. Some must be keeping their real opinions hidden and avoiding confrontation at all costs. Except for maybe Minister Murphy last Tuesday night.

This raw atmosphere of fear means that only small online groups of dissident right-wing thinkers raise their dissatisfaction with the status quo. And even they are increasingly being silenced via deplatforming and censorship.

Only in the privacy of the ballot-box have the Irish ever made their opinion on mass immigration resolutely clear, and that was the 2004 referendum on birthright citizenship. This referendum concluded with an overwhelming vote of 79% to remove the practice of birthright citizenship in Ireland.

In effect this was an electoral rejection of the idea that being born in Ireland does not necessarily make one Irish. And so we must then ask ourselves, what does it mean to be Irish? 

Is it enough to simply to live here for five years and be given a piece of Irish paper? Or does being Irish really mean something deeper and immutable, like having Irish ancestry, being born and raised in Ireland, and having a close familiarity with Irish culture?

These questions of Irishness will be answered decisively in one way or another over the coming years. If the Irish people continue to think of their national identity as just another meaningless social construct, and plough on ahead with the multicult societal experiment, then the very word ‘Irish’ will cease to correspond to any meaningful political reality. Such would be the case in a fully globalised ‘Ireland™’.

If this is not the country we aspire to become or wish to leave to future generations, then a more essential definition of Irishness will have to be peacefully asserted. It must be done in such a way that forces the liberals to sit up and pay attention to what we are saying.

To peacefully attract attention we must give insightful critique, and so we must recognise that this cheapening of Irish identity and citizenship is being pushed by the entirety of liberalism. Liberalism is a complex moral-political structure, comprising of big business on the one hand to international socialists like People Before Profit (PBP) on the other. 

Collectively they have ensured maximal populational flow into Ireland, and all in the best interests of global finance. A prime example of this was the Irish Central Bank’s summer quarterly report, which was openly looking to bring in migrant labour to depress the wages of the Irish population. Not a peep from PBP politicians Ruth Coppinger or Mick Barry about this scandal. Only more facile sloganeering like “Houses For All”.

Another example of liberalism run amok is the lobby group Ibec looking to somehow transform Ireland into ‘a prosperous island of 10 million people’ by 2050. Not 10 million Irish people mind you, but some rootless and mindless mass of economic consumers and producers.

To imagine this bleak future would be like trying to imagine an island populated by worker-consumer drones. Each one transiently drifting from its place of making capital to its place of buying product, with minimal disruption between those two modalities.

On a global scale it would be a heaving humdrum of humanity following no higher reality, loyalty or purpose than that of financial exchange and economic utility. One which would reflect a perfectly materialistic and individualistic state of mankind. A form of man without precedent in history, what one might call a type of globo-homo sapiens.

A humanity which operates by economic rationalism alone is one in which all political values are set by their monetary price. It would constitute a worldview inherently hostile to life. Without any evaluation of what is intrinsically good, such a moral configuration would gradually cease to see the point in safeguarding even its own existence.

And so if that is a fate which we should seek to avoid having here in Ireland, then the only people who will safeguard the continued welfare of the Irish are the Irish themselves.

The only way to stop this financial opportunism from wrecking this island completely is for the Irish to start realising just how serious the current situation is, and just how it endangers their vital interests. And to take that danger as a sufficient cause to fundamentally alter the politics behind the Irish State.

The Irish State should exist to consciously and assertively prioritise the interests of the Irish people, full stop. The State should be putting the interests of its own people first, and not the interests of international employers, open-border activists and lawless landlords.

The State should serve its national obligation to house its own homeless first, before serving its international obligation to accommodate strangers. It should be defending its own financial independence, and not be burdening its descendants with hundreds of billions worth of banking debt.

If we do not begin to collectively point out these absurdities and refute the illogic underlying the liberal world order, then the totality of Irish life as we know it will be picked apart and sold piece-meal to international investors. For those of us who are still loyal to our own country and who love our own people, we must politically reject the entirety of liberalism, and the sooner we do so the better.

*This piece initially contained a typo that Sinn Féin introduced the motion. This typo has now been corrected.