Immigration and Ireland - MEGATHREAD *Mod Note Added 14/08/25*

Within the guard rails of current immigration policies we are probably using between 100-200k housing units to house migrants who have never paid tax in this country. Probably more than half that number is made up of EU nationals. This is not part of the 1.2 bn IPAS. Our government shows an unbending commitment to this “international obligations!” Catch all statement. The current tax payer ratio will trend from current 5-1 to 2-1 in less than 20 years a fact well known in the department of finance. None of this will be presented for discussion in RTE.

Lest we forget the sort of numbers the government said we could adequately support when there was at least a nod that making commitments to accept people into the country needed careful planning and modicum of control.

https://gov.ie/en/department-of-children-disability-and-equality/publications/irish-refugee-protection-programme/

as an extra I wonder if this is has triggered the NGO IPAS lottery win for the in the know friends and family of FF/FG

Caps-EU: Building Capacity for Private Sponsorship in the European Union (CAPS-EU) Project

The aim of the CAPS EU Project is working to build European, national and local government, and nongovernmental stakeholders’ capacity to design, implement, sustain, and scale up community sponsorship programmes for refugees. Led by Ireland, with support from our Belgian partners Fedasil and the Migration Policy Institute Europe (MPIE) the CAPS-EU Project is co-financed by the European Commission under the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund.

It aims to capitalise on existing political and social momentum to provide communities with a means to assist with the integration of refugees in Ireland, Belgium and participating countries

Further details on the project can be found at: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/caps-eu-project

https://www.unhcr.org/ie/non-governmental-organizations-ireland Dora’s.ie gets a million a year tax payer funding and raises about 40k€ in donations and is listed as a charity

Not to mention the housing approved bodies of which there are up to 500. We can assume that most of the 6bn a year funding going through NGO is buying goods and services largely without open tendering as we saw in the Peter McVerry trust story.

A simple start would be to match tax payers contributions to NGO’s with their self funding activities total given that they are designated charities.

Again none of this will appear on RTE for at least some transparency.

In the space of a few hours time scale you claimed we needed foreign tech workers to do fill jobs here n now you are saying there is no jobs need filling - which is it?

Very complex indeed, maybe we should stockpile them til 2027, with 150k pps numbers issued a year we'll be on the front foot if tech picks up!

Could you give us a ranked list on what you think is the worst thing to be? I.e. racist, antisemitic, anti-migrant, anti uncontrolled immigration, homophobic etc.

Would be good to know how to stay within your moral standards. Maybe boards.ie could pin it on the main page

Mod - warned for trolling

I'm not sure why we need to get theatrical about it. I'm also an Irish speaker myself and have volunteered many times at the Irish colleges. I regard Gaoth Dobhair as my second home and have long standing friendships there and a deep respect for the Gaeltacht community. So please, spare me all the "just wows" and the talk of throwing people under the bus.

I was responding to a point being made about refugees being housed in Connemara — specifically a concern about this "diluting" the language. I find this a very weak point, not least because the biggest threat to the survival of the Irish language has been a combination of the lack of will of Irish people themselves to speak it, and the failure of the education system to promote it as a living language. The presence of refugees, even if one was to formulate some argument that it somehow damages the Irish language, is dwarfed as a threat to it beside the absolute major threat — that Irish people generally can't, won't or don't want to speak the language.

From my own experience, foreign people living here are some of the most interested and enthusiastic people as regards the language. Their children often also will be used to speaking different languages and have a knack for picking languages up consequently. And I'm also not just plucking that from the anecdotal air — https://www.thejournal.ie/language-key-for-migrants-in-rural-ireland-6532779-Nov2024/

In fact, over the course of the last ten years — where migration should apparently be diluting the language — I personally believe I've seen more enthusiasm for the language. I don't think migrants have necessarily been the reason for that, but their presence here doesn't seem to correlate with a decline in interest in the language.

Mod - warned for posting anecdote

Many Irish speakers have fought hard for the Irish language revival. Can you name some of the more adept in Irish foreigners who are doing the same?

I don’t think the intention was to throw Irish speakers under the bus, it was simply to point out that in contrast to the suggestion that placing asylum seekers in the Gaeltacht would dilute the language, the opposite is actually what happens where immigrants are concerned, with many demonstrating an enthusiasm for the language which isn’t present among native Irish people.

I don’t know that many Irish speakers actually have fought hard for the Irish language revival; if there were many of them, there would be objective evidence of their efforts which either of us could easily point to. What does appear to be happening though, is in the face of increasing immigration, there is an equally poor attempt to revive an Irish identity based upon whatever standards suit its proponents agenda.

One of those standards does not appear to be an ability to converse in the national language, as demonstrated here:

One random person who can’t speak Irish in a video does not equal to a ‘standard’. And of course fair play to the chap who spoke Irish. We would be delighted if everyone took such an interest

No, but we could look at implementing restriction on foreign buyers like they already have in places like Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Denmark, etc.

Yeah certainly those in the Gaeltacht wouldn't give a shite about him and he has nothing to do with their objections. I don't think putting an IPAS centre there does anything to help the language and the concerns around safety would arise as seen in many other communities suffering with these centres.

So the new gotcha moment is, we can only question the effects of mass immigration if we're fluent in Irish. Many people struggled with Irish in school and the attitude of the language purists often contributed to this.

30% of babies born in 2024 were to non Irish mothers.

No but I think trying to use the Irish language and it's continued survival as a gotcha for being anti-immigrant when it has never before been important to the individual means it comes across as more than a bit disengenous.

And it seems to be a very obvious attempt to weaponize an element of Irish cultural identity rather than any attempt to actually support it.