General Irish politics discussion thread

This, if true is an awful look for a Taoiseach - three and possibly four attempts to tell the truth.

The now routine circling of the wagons will see MSM doing it'd level best to totally ignore this.

Are SF slipping a bit or is this just a blip in the polls?

SF polls peaked 18 months ago.

The trend is one way, that is down, down down....

If you pick arbitrary points, yes they are down from their 'peak'.

Every party is 'down' from their peak.

FG are 'down down down' from their peak of 35% - shock horror.

How do you think SF should react and what policy changes should they look to implement?

Also, to the last point, yes. Amazingly, SF are losing support when the government have so many issues on the table.

It's one thing for a government to have to make hard decisions and lose support. That is somewhat understandable. But for SF to lose so much support over the last 18 months when they have not decided at all? Crazy tbh.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

And that is why SF support is plummeting in the polls.

I am not a member of any of the parties in government so it is up to them.

But if SF wants to lead the next government, maybe they should you know, lead.

At the moment they are hiding, like a bunch of infants.

Your response to the question is a perfect encapsulation to that. Afraid to put anything out there in case it comes back at ya.

Theres a very easy solution. Do what Denmark did, and introduce a stricter regime for asylum seekers. Their number of asylum seekers dropped from 20k a year to 2k a year after they started actually controling their borders.

They did this while party to exactly the same EU and UN treaties and legal obligations that Ireland is.

This isn't some theoretical "what could we possibly do" scenario. We have a real world example, of a well functioning, liberal, Northern European country, thats the same size as Ireland, reducing the number of asylum seekers they let in by 90% within the last few years completely successfully.

And as a result the immigration issue has receded there, and their previously rising rapidly far-right party has lost all its support.

Circa 80% of the population of Ireland wants fewer asylum seekers taken in now. And its the #1 issue for voters in the country according to the Irish Times' poll today. So either our mainstream parties do it or soon, or far-right parties who promise to do so will start taking those votes.

We're literally projected to hit 20k asylum seekers this year, according to our government. We've had close to 15k the last number of years.

Accomodating asylum seekers is costing the state billions of euros a year (the projection is €3bn for last year, significantly more than was spent on public transportation for the country).

And the numbers of both asylum seekers, and the cost, are only going to go up every year as the climate crisis worsens.

Sooner or later we have to control who enters the country - and Denmark shows us its completely possible to do so.

20k a year (and increasing) of asylum seekers arriving require circa 7500 new housing units to house them, or almost 20% of the total houses being build in the state this year. Having 18k fewer people entering the state this year (if we managed a Denmark style reduction of 90%) would make a massive difference to our housing crisis.

This isn't touching on Ukrainians at all, who're a completely separate issue.

The promise I remember was to take in 100k refugees which is an order of magnitude above the 13k in emergency accommodation, and by a government whose policies deliberately fuelled the housing crisis. Making what at best is a tone-deaf unkeepable promise was begging for trouble.

Tens of thousands of people are turning up at our border every year, approx 60% last year with no passport or official documents, and they're entering our country. Anyone who shows up at the border with no passport is allowed to claim asylum and stay. Thats not controlling who enters the country.

The decisions, and how long it takes to make them, are quite irrelevant. Only 248 failed asylum seekers were deported from the state in 2022, 285 from Jan-end of Nov 2023. Thats a tiny % of the total, the vast vast majority of people who arrive here illegally are being allowed to stay.

Asylum seekers don't stay in direct provision for decades, they sooner or later end up in the normal housing market, taking up housing. The idea that 20,000 people arriving a year won't put any additional pressure on the housing market is just completely at odds with any grasp of reality. Thats the equivalent of a new Sligo town sized town needing to built every year, just to house these people.

And, again, theres the fact that all of this is costing the state literally billions of euros a year. And that 80% of Irish people say they want numbers reduced. Both extremely relevant facts, you'd think.

Denmark's number of asylum seekers was increasing by 20-40% a year, every year, for multiple years on end in the early 2010s. A situation similar to the one Ireland is in right now. They then introduced measures to restrict this, and their numbers dropped by 90%. We could do exactly what they did tomorrow, if our government wanted to. Theres literally nothing stopping us.