Immigration and Ireland - MEGATHREAD *Mod Note Added 02/09/25*

When someone from the right is being interviewed about immigration the presenter of whatever programme they are on always goes at them hell for leather when asking questions.

Just to be clear I have no issue with that if the same was done when a Green, SD or Labour TD is being asked about the same topic but this never happens.

I’ve never seen Richard Boyd Barrett put through a good tough interview on his policies.

It's actually ridiculous that these things even need to be explained.

Common sense tells you that there must be some upper limit on immigration numbers and if you are paying out on social welfare benefits to an ever increasing number of people you'll eventually run out of taxpayer money to spend on that. When it comes to housing you will eventually just run out of homes. If you don't scale services like healthcare and public transport to keep up with an influx of people then you'll run into big problems eventually there too.

You may as well be saying "Little Johnny had 10 Euro. He then bought 9 items costing 1 Euro each. How and why does Johnny only have 1 Euro left now?"

It feels like we should be talking about sustainability at a minimum here, and figuring out what our upper limits might be, but instead the plan seems to be to drive everything to the absolute critical breaking point and only then try to come up with a plan.

It's not hypocritical to work in Brown Thomas and shop in Dunnes.

It definitely is hypocritical to work publically advocating for a State policy that you won't personally adopt.

We have already run out of Secondary school place for many children . Parents having to drive out of the area as the schools in Dublin and other areas are over prescribed . So how did that happen suddenly ? poor planning for an increasing population of course, its obvious . And its also obvious that we well run out of houses, hotels etc unless its controlled .

Do people think this make much of a difference?

We can but dream

It was obvious with the stupidity of O'Gorman & the incompetence of McEntee, the Ukrainian situation was never going to end well. If the war is over shortly will any of them be sent back : unlikely I would think. The numbers we took in was pure madness, but with everything the Government was throwing at them you couldn't blame them for travelling across all the safe countries to come here. The modular homes given to them were another ridiculous plan.

With McEntee deciding what was & wasn't a safe country, she was looking through the wrong end of the telescope, she should have decided what countries were actually at war & everyone else could go scratch. As posters have said, if Farage gets in over then we had better cop on & fast.

Sorry I wasn’t very clear. I meant the changes announced today . Do people think it will make a difference to the number of people who will apply for asylum in the future

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/1126/1545870-asylum-cabinet/

If there wasn't a problem with immigration yesterday or the last 10 yrs..... Why did the laws have to be changed?

Squeaky wheel gets the oil.

If you've never payed tax in the state you should never get citizenship. No representation, without taxation if you will.

"5 year wait for non EU migrants / asylum claimants ? I thought it was already a 5 year wait for non EU residents."

It is 5 years, but it's 3 years for asylum seekers. The 5 year rule is now being applied to asylum seekers as well. I think 5 years is too short a length of time to reside here before applying for Irish citizenship, but that's just my opinion. I would rather see 10 years(at least). If you are married to an Irish citizen, then I would cut that time in half.

I think it was madness anyway to begin with that asylum seekers were able to apply for citizenship 2 years sooner than everyone else. One of the criteria for applying for Irish citizenship is that you "have the correct identity documents to prove who you are". So what's happening with all these people who are destroying their documentation before they enter Ireland?