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Immigration and Ireland - MEGATHREAD *Mod Note Added 02/09/25*
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Normally I would be enraged by this, but actually I’m quite triumphant. It feels like the death-cry of progressive Ireland. It tries to demolish its opponents with calm, detached contempt, but really we can see it is barely contained hysterics.
“The point for both Hutch and Ahern is that the names of these countries act as proxies for race. They stand for Darkest Africa”
Well, he’s right. They stand for the most underdeveloped countries on the planet. But of course O’Toole is playing with “darkest” here. He wants you to believe that Ahern and Hutch have a colonialist’s view of Africa and its people. This is Ahern who oversaw Ireland’s first surge of immigration.
Their underlying suggestion is that inward migration should be a sieve that lets through the foreign workers who will do the lowly jobs we’re too posh for, but blocks those who are fleeing conflicts in Africa from seeking asylum.
O’Toole’s lame joke about Lanigan’s Ball racism is that Ahern and Hutch don’t want immigration but know that without it we’d be poor, so they’re in and they’re out.
But what else should our immigration policy be? It is about balancing the benefits with the negatives.
There is plenty of anti-black prejudice in Ireland but it is not structural: we don’t have a history of black slavery as the United States does, of genocide against an indigenous black population as Australia does or of colonial overlordship in Africa and the Caribbean as Britain does. It’s hard to present as an explicit political offering the position that Ahern and Hutch are hinting at: that we welcome immigrants so long as they are not black.
O’Toole is a smart man, but this is one of the stupidest things I’ve read. He is so convinced by his ideology that he believes only a “structural” cause could sustain anti-black racism. He just cannot conceive that the fact that certain cultures bring with them certain behaviours will be more than enough to sustain an aversion to that kind of immigration.
The article is dripping with contempt for the woman who filmed Ahern. He calls her a “table d’hote xenophobe”, “an equal-opportunities nativist”, and refers to her “full-monty naked hostility to foreigners”. He says “the woman’s big narrative” is that “the Irish are being replaced on their own little island and that Irish culture is ‘gone’” but dismisses her and her kind by saying “they don’t really have much of a clue about Us – their grasp on Irish history and culture is weak”.
Fintan O’Toole has churned out many of these supercilious deconstructions, but they’ve become stale. Right when he most needs them to have their effect, they fall flat.
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