If you want to understand the thinking of the Irish establishment about their own country and the people in it, then you need only read Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times today.
In fact you do not even need to read the whole thing. This was one of those pieces where to understand the entire column, you need only read the opening and closing paragraphs:
“In a country struggling to cope with a growing population, it seems reasonable to limit the number of migrants allowed in. I’m all in favour of this with just one proviso: those who want to see it happen should volunteer to do all the crap jobs…
….If we were serious about stopping people coming here to work in low-paid jobs, we would have to be willing to do three things. One would be to greatly increase the number of Irish early school leavers – not, I think, a social policy any party is going to advocate. The second would be to abolish crap jobs by hugely improving wages and conditions for those at the bottom – and consequently paying much higher prices for the services they provide. And the third would be to conscript all Conor McGregor’s “Ireland for the Irish” fans into a standing army of toilet cleaners, social care workers, fruit and vegetable pickers, Deliveroo couriers, security guards, chambermaids, meat factory butchers and kitchen porters. Instead of flipping Vs at dark-skinned people, they could flip burgers for Ireland.”
This is tired, hackneyed stuff. The best that could be said about it is that it is the kind of argument that might have been original in an Islington salon in the heyday of Tony Blair, and then – as all smug progressive left arguments do – arrived in Ranelagh and Donnybrook a year or three later after somebody had been to London and picked up a copy of The New Statesman.
That low-skilled migrants end up doing low-skilled jobs is hardly the insight of a genius. What’s more, the argument that low-skilled migrants end up doing low-skilled jobs ignores the very basic point that the presence of low-skilled migrants creates downward pressure on the wages for low-skilled jobs through the well-known mechanism of supply and demand. Thus, jobs like being a Deliveroo rider, which in previous generations might have been seen as the kind of thing a college student would do for extra cash, are suddenly the preserve of migrants who rely on such jobs not as a supplement to their income, but for their entire earnings.
Why are low-paid jobs low-paid? Because there are more applicants for those jobs than there are positions to fill. You can rest assured, my friends, that if Ireland suddenly had a massive influx of highly-qualified solicitors and barristers, causing the price of legal services to plummet because there were suddenly more solicitors than available clients, something would be done to protect salary levels in that profession.
Further, the market does not only work in one direction. Imagine a universe where a lack of available Deliveroo drivers meant that the fee per delivery increased to dozens of euros. In that case, either Deliveroo driving would no longer be a low-paid job, or more of us would get off our asses and collect our own food. Choosing a situation where people come here to do low-paid jobs and compete for scraps is an economic strategy. It is not an economic law that these jobs must be low-paid, or that they must necessarily exist.
But of course, this being Ireland, and this being Fintan O’Toole, it is not enough to simply make an economic argument which ignores basic and obvious context: There must also be a moral dimension, preferably with some extra-virgin preening drizzled across it. In this case, the moral dimension to his argument is that since Irish people once went overseas to work in low-skilled jobs in other countries, we can have no complaints about large numbers of people from developing countries coming here to do the same.
This is the duopoly of modern Irish elite morality: On the one hand, we must bemoan our history of emigration and the situation that arose where so many Irish people had to go abroad and – as the story goes – suffer. We are all familiar with the tales of the oppressed Irish, pick-axe in hand, digging out the London underground for a shilling a month and barely permitted to show his face in public alongside the blacks and the dogs. It is essential to our identity as one of the most oppressed peoples of all time.
And yet, here we are, also using that story to justify the exploitation of others: Now we are to be prideful, it seems, of the humble Brazilian scooting around Dublin on his bike delivering Quinoa burgers to the denizens of Terenure, just so he can earn the €1500 a month he pays to live in a bike shed in Coolock.
To be honest, I think that all sounds a bit mad. I think Fintan would too, if he thought about it for more than the fifteen minutes he spent coming up with it.
But of course, we get, in the end, to the key point: I will repeat the quote he offers us at the conclusion.
And the third would be to conscript all Conor McGregor’s “Ireland for the Irish” fans into a standing army of toilet cleaners, social care workers, fruit and vegetable pickers, Deliveroo couriers, security guards, chambermaids, meat factory butchers and kitchen porters. Instead of flipping Vs at dark-skinned people, they could flip burgers for Ireland.”
This, really, is the entire core of the piece: It is not and never was about the migrants. It was about class contempt for Anto from Finglas who wears his Celtic shirt and shouts up the Dubs and thinks Bobby Sands was a grand fella altogether and who – as Hillary Clinton once said – bitterly clings to his national identity because it’s all he has.
They really would like to replace Anto, you know. Anto is not getting invited to any dinner parties in Donnybrook, because you can’t get any kudos for inviting him. But Antonio from Brazil who speaks Portuguese and really supports President Lula’s efforts to stymie the far-right? You can invite him no problem, no matter what he does for work.
Because this is what migrants are, in the worldview articulated by Fintan’s article: They really do enrich the nation by giving us a better class of underclass. More exotic. More visually appealing. Better teeth. And what’s more, you feel better about the poverty of migrants than you feel about the poverty of Anto from Finglas.
After all, these people come from deprived countries: It’s not your fault. You are giving them a better life.
Anto’s deprivation, on the other hand? That’s all on this country. It’s all on the establishment that Fintan O’Toole has been at the heart of – despite his protestations – for forty years. Anto is a mirror into their own failings as a governing class. Antonio, on the other hand, makes them feel better about themselves because this is a country he wants to come to.
So yes, they do want to “replace” people.
The McGregor fans with their tricolours are the cultural enemy and the mirror they wish to shatter. The economics of migration have next to nothing to do with it.