Asylum Crisis: The Irish State Cannot Manage the Decline

December 2023

A culinary dispute at CItywest between Ukranian and Afghan asylum seekers has culminated in arguably the most turbulent weeks in recent Irish history. 

Flames lapped across the M50 as an outmatched Public Order Unit meant for low-level crowd control at Boh’s matches was forced to call an equally understaffed Defence Forces to put down the largest civil disturbance since the burning of the British Embassy after Bloody Sunday.

Originally earmarked for 400 asylum seekers, the tidal wave of applicants had resulted in the conference centre turned refugee hub becoming the de facto dumping ground for an overstretched asylum system.

Officials had warned of intercommunal strife between Muslim and non-Muslim residents during Ramadan with exhausted IPO workers scrambling to put arrivals on buses to whatever rural towns deemed too weak to put up resistance. 

A spate of arson attacks by inner-city Dubs and nationwide blockades had spiralled throughout the latter half of 2023 to the point that Minister Roderic O’Gorman was forced to call on the GAA and Catholic Church to meet the overflow.

Recently passed hate speech legislation was not enough to take the sting out of growing public unease as voters sought any sort of populist safety valve to voice their objection. Mealy-mouth statements by rural TDs and orchestrated dog-whistling by Fine Gael press organs were not enough to patch over the political chasm seen in a rising tide of public protests.

A viral video of a female transition year student being groped by Somalian refugees in Arklow added fuel to the fire with a sleep-deprived Aoife Gallagher brought onto Virgin Media to call for a clampdown on WhatsApp as vigilantes patrolled outside a nearby refugee centre seemingly with the approval of local Gardaí.

Armed escorts were formally authorised for certain TDs in October after Paul Murphy was left beaten to a pulp after a run-in in Jobstown with a leaked Sinn Féin group chat about playing both sides of the asylum debate doing the rounds on social media.

The situation ignited Tuesday, December 19th when authorities lost control of the Citywest facility to rioters following the stabbing of an Ukranian by an Afghan youth over halal food meat products. 

TikTok footage showed refugees engaging in what appeared to be a pitched battle on the grounds of the facility as commuter traffic delayed what measly Garda response could be mustered the week before Christmas. 

Fed up with a lack of Islamic dietary products, bureaucracy and an industrial dispute with caterers, refugees commenced burning Citywest in the hope of getting an upgrade in accommodation. A practice common at asylum centres in Europe since 2014.

The six-one news that evening carried an interview with a petrified NGO worker forced to lock themselves in the toilets while the riot tore through the complex.

Horrified Clondalkin residents witnessed a flow of displaced refugees wandering through local estates as RTÉ’s Micheál Lehane reported at least 4 deaths from the commotion. Troops from the Curragh finally quelled disturbances a full 18 hours after they began.

With Citywest up in smoke, refugees attempted to pitch tents in any available greenfield site across Dublin about the time Leo Varadkar convened an emergency meeting of the Cabinet in Government Buildings. 

After Citywest, the NGO complex immediately took to the airwaves to warn about the “rise of the far-right” ignoring the effect the riots had on the country’s consciousness never mind the clear and presetn danger of roaming refugees.

INAR’s Shane OCurry was told that he would “have his block knocked off” in a heated Liveline radio debate with mothers over refugees setting up camp on an Inchicore schoolyard.

The British Home Office under a recently reinstalled Boris Johnson issued a scolding to the Irish government saying that it would act against a growing stream of refugees arriving to the UK using Northern Ireland route as cars of Albanians were reported in Belfast as soon as CItywest went up in flames. “Soft-touch Éire” became a punchbag for jingoistic UK tabloids with certain Tory MPs calling for a suspension of the Common Travel Area due to the Irish government’s open border policies.

Blockades already ongoing for months in various parishes grew exponentially on the back of the CItywest riot with two Fianna Fáil TDs announcing their intention to resign from the party citing a grassroots turn against the asylum system.

Sensing where the wind was blowing a mumbling Mattie McGrath appeared on Tucker Carlson to make a bungled Irish version of the “Rivers of Blood” speech as American audiences struggled to comprehend his Midlands drawl.

The arrival of dozens of asylum seekers to Trinity College’s Front Square posed an awkward dilemma for the uni’s open border student’s union with TCDSU President László Molnárfi rebuked after discussing Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution to a gaggle of sniggering Georgians.

A week after Citywest an Irish Independent report described how GardaI were worried that they were unable to police growing standoffs between Dubliners and asylum encampments as Saorise McHugh linked the crisis to a climate breakdown in a special Journal.ie opinion piece.

The now infamous Mount Street squat topped 2,000 that week and stretched all the way to Dublin’s Silicon Docklands. Bemused Indian tech-workers mocked Ireland on social media thinking that they left excrement-covered streets behind them in Calcutta rather than a European capital.

Rumours went around government circles that British private security forms were being covertly drafted in to put down the disquiet (both from the asylum seekers and increasingly rebellious Irish) as Roderic O’Gorman announced his intention to leave politics for the UN shortly before the end of the Oireachtas term. 

Officials practically begged O’Gorman not to trigger a by-election in Dublin-West by leaving early.

Nearing the end of February 2024 the Fair City was preparing for a mass march not seen since the zenith of the Water Protests as civil servants confirmed that EU and UN commitments Ireland was obliged to accept 100,000 refugees per annum. No ifs or buts.

Asylum skirmishes in West Dublin were the last thing on the mind of the international community as drone strikes on Warsaw and a cyberattack on a Californian bank led to fears of a worldwide mega recession.

The Defence Forces were seen barricading Kildare Street Friday, February 23rd in preparation for the anti-asylum march which began with strategic blockades of Dublin Airport and the M50 by a coalition of community groups and energetic farmers. 

Despite the mobilisations against the influx Ireland was still without a significant far-right presence with one hapless Longford-based figure earning himself a lengthy prison sentence after posting zany early morning social media messages denouncing International Jewry. Gardaí leaped on the faux pas to proscribe multiple right-wing groups with even subsequent media hit pieces failing to dent growing anger against the asylum debacle.

Exasperated by footage of a midday melee between Finglas youngfellas and a gang of Sudanese, a cadaverous Leo Varadkar took to the airwaves to issue a decree banning the march. 

DIarmuid Ferriter likened the situation to the botched Blueshirt march on Dublin in his Irish Times op-ed with republican socialist group Anti-Imperialist Action issuing a bizarre video linking the backlash to MI5 dirty tricks and calling on workers to embrace the revolutionary teachings of Seamus Costello.

Quivering members of the Defence Forces were easily able to repel protestors on Kildare Street however a stampede caused by the firing of rubber bullets killed two on College Green. A video of a Herculean Phil Dwyer putting a member of the Public Order Unit into a headlock earned international kudos among right-wing Telegram channels the world over.

One clip of a tearful young Irish soldier saying that he agreed with the marchers while in uniform did wonders to unsettle government officials as the Sunday Times linked the turmoil to Russian interference. The Irish left opted for blaming dark money from U.S. evangelicals.

The Dublin government formally requested Drew Harris to call on the PSNI to bolster failing crowd control as another demonstration was called for St Patrick’s Day in the aftermath of the deaths on College Green.

Across Dublin, community workers reported a morid trend of a collapse in trust for Gardaí as residents turned to communitarian solutions over a failing state with many warning that figures attached to drug cartels entering the vacuum. The Albanian mafia had established a presence in the Dublin drug market using the asylum system as an entrance point with growing speculation Rosslare port could become a major human trafficking hub.

On the morning of St Patrick’s Day 2024 Dublin City Centre was again heavily militarised with Gardaí, Defence Forces personnel and freshly dispatched PSNI complete with Tangi Land Rovers manning all major choke points in and out of the city. 

As tens of thousands of Dubliners marched towards the barricades few could imagine the carnage that would unfold that day….

Decline and Dáil Eireann 

This fanciful narrative was generated by the imagination of a bored right-wing extremist waiting for his early morning flight. A snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening (at least in this timeline), this piece of fiction does not negate the self-inflicted turbulence on the cards for the Republic as the social wounds of the crisis grow rancid. 

Declines such what the Irish state is on can last a century or be propelled to the brink by a single black swan moment. By opening up the country to asylum scroungers from Algiers to Kabul our government has indeed invited in a whole bevy of swans and is the process of passing laws to stop us from noticing.

The Irish elite has little capacity or competency to manage even minor disturbances that small European nation-states have been able to deal with over the past decade and has minimal political will to stop or even slow down the asylum binge swamping the nation at large.

Without so much of a functioning military let alone an autonomous intelligence agency our elite’s first line of defence is in fact their last when it comes to civil unrest from either refugees or revolting Irish aborigines. Some bogger culchies and diversity hires in a booth at the gates of Leinster House are the thin blue line holding up the NGO regime.

Like an asylum centre inferno sooner or later the ruse will go up in smoke and the fallback solution for any Irish government hardpressed by its own citizens will be recourse to the British security state. 

Mass immigration into Ireland is by design an ideological project and one for which the consequences therein are barely mapped out even by the people who perpetuate it. Embrace the turbulence but do not forget the social engineers and charlatans who imposed it on us all.