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

These are CSO figures not census results.

This just highlights what a sham the whole accommodation system under IPAS really is. As you’ve pointed out, there are Brazilians and others crammed four to a room, which isn’t great either - it only lines the pockets of slum landlords - but at least in their case, they’re paying rent and working hard to keep the money coming in.

Then you have people arriving from Lord knows where (because half the time we don't know). They’re housed in hotels - yes, often sharing rooms - but still getting free meals, no utility bills, a weekly allowance, and after six months the legal right to work (if they’re not already working off the books in the gig economy or black market).

I’ve seen posters here dismiss any criticism of the setup, saying it’s ridiculous or petty to be jealous of the poor craythurs in IPAS as it's no life. But the reality is that many in the system are better off than a lot of working people outside it. IPAS has become a back-door route to a work visa, with the added bonus of free bed and board along the way. It’s absurd.

I remember back during Covid, at the height of the BLM marches, the line being pushed was that direct provision was the modern-day Magdalene laundries. Jesus wept! Thankfully, that rhetoric seemed to die off soon enough and I’ve not really heard it since.

A chart from the recently released CSO estimates:

Net-inward migration

These are net migration figures. Irish people continue to leave the country in relatively small numbers with net outward migration of a few thousand. Non-EU inward migration continues to dwarf EU inward though both are down on last year. Probably the extreme housing situation is the limiting factor. It is a reverse of the situation before the financial crisis when most of the inward migration was EU and UK-based. We also had at that time net-inward migration of Irish people.

I think another interesting thing about the chart is that during the worst of the financial crisis when tens of thousands of Irish people left the country, we still had net-Inward migration of non-EU people.

48 people to lose their jobs because of this but who cares.

I suspect no one asked them if they're happy to be sacrificed for the sake of refugees.

Most of them are probably foreign

So because of that they are expendable?

Yeah they'll be grand, who cares anyway, maybe they will ,maybe they won't, maybe they'll get into mortgage or rent arrears, all what it matters is the refugees.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt and consider this you being sarcastic on account of my previous posts; you misunderstood them, and my position regarding non-EU and particular Indian immigrants.

Massive inward migration into a country with a pre-existing housing crisis! This is madness.

As an aside, there has been really poor reporting of this in the media, it's like they are nervy to do the obvious thing, which is discuss how net immigration of 60,000 people is going to impact on housing, services and infrastructure. By my calculations and using the average household size, the number of houses built last year won't match population growth from immigration/natural increase. So the housing crisis is going to get worse not better.

Can everyone now see that we need less rather than more immigration?!

Where is this work though, if they live in or around Dundrum they will have to travel to their new job. So that's an added expense which they didn't have last week. That's assuming they have transport in the first place. And yes I understand that plenty of people in the country commute for work but that's not the discussion here.

The business was viable until a migrant centre was set up there, which made it no longer viable. And this happened with multiple businesses, e.g. restaurants who depended on tourists were closed when local hotels were turned into migrant housing centres. Migrants should not be housed in hotels, because it not only disrupts local community and local businesses, it's also against the purpose for which the hotel was approved in the first place. No one else could change the purpose of a building like that without getting all sorts of approvals and planning permissions and also involve the local community.

the communities are in decline and had been before any centres, so it's a question of whether it's good value for money to pore money into communities that won't bring any actual value or benefit in return.

sure you could pore a whole lot of money into them but the reality is people are leaving those communities anyway for a better life so it becomes a case of diminishing returns.

remember the big cause of the refugee and migrant numbers is the ukrain war.

Weird take.

it doesn't happen because it makes no sense.

they close because they just aren't viable businesses and were hanging on by a thread before the centres arrived.

there is going to be a lot of closures of hotels and pubs ETC due to changes in habits, less tourists visiting due to poor value for money and similar.