There is a question that hovers over Irish politics: what will the parties of power do when they start to panic about losing it? Last week, after their joint debacle in the presidential election, we got the grim answer: turn on immigrants. <\/p>\n
One of the reasons the far right has been less potent in Ireland is that most mainstream politicians have been responsible in their utterances on immigration<\/a>. The Government<\/a> parties have not followed their centrist counterparts in other countries by trying to compete on the terms set by ethnonationalist reactionaries. Until now. <\/p>\n Last week, the T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris<\/a> said: \u201cOur migration numbers are too high, and I think that is really an issue that needs to be considered in a very serious way by Government. One of the reasons I think they are so high is that there are too many people who come to this country and are told they do not have a right to be here, and it is taking too long for them to leave the country.\u201d<\/p>\n On any ordinary understanding of language, Harris was saying that failed asylum seekers who have not yet been deported make up a very significant proportion of what he considers to be excessive inward migration. And by any ordinary understanding of honest public discourse, this is dangerous nonsense.<\/p>\n It so obviously absurd that I assumed at first that Harris had, as the Americans say, misspoken \u2013 he surely just mangled his words. But the following day, his most senior colleague Pascal Donohoe agreed with what Harris had said<\/a>. And Fine Gael<\/a> TD Barry Ward said his leader\u2019s comments had been \u201cmeasured and absolutely factually correct. He has identified the fact that we do have massive pressure on our migration system, there\u2019s no disputing that\u201d.<\/p>\n If migration is too high, non-deportation has damn all to do with it. The connection between the claim and the evidence is utterly spurious<\/p>\n Ward, like Harris, referred to \u201cmigration\u201d rather than \u201casylum\u201d. Both men could have said \u2013 with rational justification \u2013 that there is great pressure on the asylum system. They didn\u2019t \u2013 they said that the problem is with migration. And they did this in a \u201cmeasured\u201d (calculated and deliberate) way.<\/p>\n Just over 125,000 people came to Ireland in the 12 months up to April this year. Of these, 31,500 were Irish citizens returning from abroad. Let\u2019s assume that these Irish returnees do not count in Harris\u2019s \u201ctoo much\u201d \u2013 so we\u2019re talking about an annual influx of around 94,000 migrants from other countries.<\/p>\n On the other side of this equation, 2,403 deportation orders were signed in 2024. Of these 1,116 people departed the State, mostly voluntarily \u2013 so 1,287 people were, in Harris\u2019s terms, \u201ctold they do not have a right to be here\u201d but failed or refused to \u201cleave the country\u201d. <\/p>\n Thus, failed asylum seekers who have not yet left the country make up less than two per cent of annual inward migration. To put it another way, if all the failed asylum seekers had been deported, the number of non-Irish immigrants would have fallen from 93,800 to 92,600. <\/p>\n