O’Callaghan Steps Onto the Asylum Hot Seat

Within the Irish Cabinet there are some portfolios earmarked for political death.

Health is the most obvious one having consumed the career of Mary Harney most famously with Varadkar avoiding too much political flak in the post before moving on to the Department of Taoiseach. Beginning about the turn of the last decade the Department of Justice has transformed into being seen as another ministerial albatross magnified by a failure of the judiciary to prosecute crimes accordingly and more recently being responsible for handling almost all of the Republic’s asylum ills.

News of the appointment of Dublin Bay South’s Jim O’Callaghan to the Justice should be met with some (very) minor relief considering the four years of ideological capture by erstwhile Green leader Roderic O’Gorman.

Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael party manifestos were adamant about the need to centralise asylum policy into the hands of the Department of Justice following four years of inter-institutional turf war with O’Gorman’s Integration Department.The multiple IPAS failures, tent cities on the Grand Canal, the lack of forethought when it came to the 2022 Ukrainian surge nevermind a hundred and one PR debacles has dirtied the bib of the Department of Integration in particular among civil service circles with the perception that O’Gorman had exceeded his brief during his four year tenure.

Regarding themselves as one of the few safe pairs of hands within the state administration the Department of Justice has gladly scooped up asylum responsibility from Integration with O’Callaghan likely to act as figurehead for this new consolidation.

Lacking some of the more dire motivations for nation wrecking and open border activism ostensibly O’Callaghan should be viewed as a mild improvement on the disgruntled Green leader who ran a horse and cart through the asylum system wholeheartedly since 2020.

Typecast by many within the party as a Martin loyalist firmly on the progressive end of Fianna Fáil was nevertheless seen on the national airwaves lamenting the phenomenon of destroyed passports within the asylum system.

A quick glance at the parliamentary record or select speeches on the matter reveal O’Callaghan to be committed to the open borders project often masked through small r republicanism.

More than likely to pursue a “rules based policy” in the face of McEntee’s inertia and O’Gorman’s maliciousness however petty this shift in state rhetoric should be seen as a sign that the needle is moving at a ministerial level.

Will O’Callaghan act as a centre right safety valve on replacement migration? Probably not even that but breaking the back on the O’Gorman era as well as clipping the institutional wings of the Department of Integration is a small but positive smart.

Devoid of migration as a topic of discussion since the Birthright Citizenship in 2004 the Irish state nevermind Sinn Fein is finding its level when it comes to dogwhistling on the migration topic as populist opposition gradually gets on its feet.Ostensibly the programme for government, while committing itself to accelerated migrant visas demands greater strictness when it comes to asylum fraud particularly when it comes to asylum fraud.

With the Martin era in Fianna Fáil drawing to a close and migration dead centre on the agenda it awaits to be seen how much of a dogs dinner O’Callaghan makes of his portfolio. Even without a mainstream populist vehicle and heavy localisation to the Dublin working class the topic of replacement migration is on the lips of a considerable amount of the Irish public with O’Callaghan’s political prospects likely to prosper or perish at his ability to keep the asylum tents off greenspaces around the country.