November 27, 2023 - 10:00am
Last week’s Dublin riots saw the most riot police deployed in Irish state history, according to the country’s justice minister. While the immediate cause was the stabbing of several children and carers by a man who moved to Ireland from Algeria, unrest had been building for some time.
Before the riots, many outside of Ireland were unaware of just how radical the Republic’s experiment with migration over the past decade has been. The numbers speak for themselves. A full 2.8% of the population is made up of people who have moved to Ireland only in the last year. This means that if you walk down the average Irish street, one in 35 people will be newcomers to the country.
While Ireland had been accepting large numbers of migrants for a long time, this was turbocharged by the war in Ukraine. Ireland, whose political and media classes have become notably outward-looking over the past decade, wanted to prove its liberal values and committed to hosting huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees. On a per capita basis, Ireland accepted six times more refugees than Britain — and made almost no plans for how to accommodate them.
The latest numbers show that Ireland’s foreign-born population is 904,800 people. This means that 18% of the Irish population is foreign-born. In a recent paper on immigration, fertility rates and demographic change, the demographer Paul Morland and I highlighted that no country had successfully integrated more than 15% of foreign-born people. We argued that anything over 15% was highly experimental, and Ireland has proved our argument for us.
Why are Irish leaders doing this to their country? The country’s elite has become obsessed with foreign cultural politics, especially that which emanates from the United States. One of Ireland’s most popular opinion columnists, Fintan O’Toole, moonlights as Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton University. His columns are typical of the new Irish elite: all domestic issues are interpreted through the lens of American politics.
This means that the entire immigration issue, for example, is framed in an identical manner to the immigration debate in the United States. So when in America those who dislike the porous border with Mexico are framed as racist hillbillies, the Irish “East American” liberal elite go in search of racist hillbillies of their own and find them among the working class of Dublin’s inner city. This became particularly acute when liberal power players in Washington DC developed an obsession with “far-Right” Trump supporters, and columnists like O’Toole spread that fear to Ireland.
Ireland has become a sort of cultural satrapy of American liberalism. Yet while the Irish elite are comfortable in their satrap roles, the broader population finds the new ideologies foreign and bizarre. They simply do not understand them. Most citizens have basically the same view of Ireland as they did before the American liberal revolution swept the shores of the country. And this puts them on a collision course with an increasingly out-of-touch and frightened elite, whose control appears to be slipping.
Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and investment professional, and the author of The Reformation in Economics
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SubscribeIn 2020, the Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee said the following about the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” of BLM:
When Dublin had its own “fiery but mostly peaceful protest” there was no talk about the riots being a response to an attack on schoolchildren, a result of urban decay or the marginalization of poor inner-city communities. Not at all. The response was very robust language, the deployment of riot police and now, the loan of two water cannon from Northern Ireland. Hypocrisy, Luxury Beliefs, and Virtue-signalling rolled up and delivered as official policy by the Minister for Just-Us.
Come off it mate! Check out the just-released investigative documentary on the death George Floyd: The Fall of Minneapolis. It’s available as livestream on https://rumble.com.
The Minneapolis police were sold out by the city’s own irresponsible Left-leaning leaders eager to parade their anti-racist credentials. The Fall of Minneapolis shows police bodycam footage which was suppressed at the Chauvin trial along with other vital information which would have shown Floyd’s death in a whole new light. But, Hey! Let’s not undermine the SJWs in pursuit of them ‘reparations’.
I have watched ‘The Fall of Minnesota’. It is a methodical and detailed exploration of what we all fear the most, a complete disregard for the rule of law.
Floyd was a lifelong criminal and drug addict who died of an overdose and heart disease. He was elevated to martyrdom in order to keep the myth of “systemic” racism against black people going.
What is systemic and completely acceptable/encouraged is the discrimination and demonization of white men. If George Floyd had been white and Derek Chauvin had been black, we wouldn’t know either of those names.
He was quoting! That’s what the indent means!
The Minister for “Just-Us” !!! Superb. Some of us will be borrowing that.
Why didn’t the Irish rioters do so under the banner Irish Lives Matter?
In the initial stages there was actually a middle-aged man standing in front of police lines with an “Irish Lives Matter” sign.
I don’t know what became of him – probably had to do a runner when things heated up. Completely ignored by the media anyway.
It seems like there is a mass movement in the West to destroy all cultural trappings (and subsequent protections) of Europeans and white Americans in order to replace these with a culture and populace more conducive and obedient to corporations and the politicians that work for them. Any attempt to prevent this from happening will simply be labelled extremist or far-right.
Or just to fit the noise in their echo chambers. As Dr Who (Tom Baker) once said, the very powerful and the very stupid fit the facts to their opinions, not the other way around.
The people who notice are called conspiracy theorists
Also you will be told that the great replacement is not happening, but its a good thing that it is
I used to go to Dublin a lot years back and I was amazed at the demographic change when I saw the video footage online. Even when I recently watched a 20 year old film set in Dublin, it was still basically as I remembered. So this monumental population change has all occurred in the space of a single generation.
Yes it is startling.
Those in the Irish governing class don’t give a damn about the country. They don’t give a damn about the Irish people either. They only care about looking good to their peers and superiors at the EU or any other supranational entity.. The word salad standard script response by Varadkar to the rioting was sociopathic, as was his surreal tweet about the ‘lost’ (actually kidnapped) girl being returned by Hamas. Dangerously delusional. Calling people ‘far right’ or ‘racist’ is so overused now that it is meaningless.
The criticism of Leo Varadkar lacks charity. The offending tweet was part of a one-page letter. The offending phrase “lost and now found” was in the first paragraph. It was probably inspired by John Newton or the Parable of the Prodigal Son or perhaps criminally, by U2, albeit an earlier song of theirs.
The second paragraph was much stronger and said this:
A critic might take umbrage at the use of the passive voice (“was snatched”) but still, I don’t think the Taoiseach has received fair play at all. The little girl is a dual Irish-Israeli citizen, and the Taoiseach was right to issue a statement and to welcome her release.
Overall, the world would be a much better place if we all tried to ascribe a bit more charity to the motives of our political opposites, one of whom for me is most definitely, Leo Varadkar.
Part of being a political leader is getting these things right. Varadkar never gets these things right. He appears to have no empathy at all. And whenever he is challenged, he just petulantly doubles down.
He has never got anything right or even won an election and yet he mysteriously rises higher and higher, always failing upwards. Was there ever such a pathetic mediocrity in Irish politics (and we really love our mediocrities)?
it took multiple counts for Leo to be elected in 2020, I think he will lose his seat in the next election, so will Ivana Bacik, which will be hilarious
Can you remember the hot water Senator Catherine Noone got into around the time of the 2020 General Election for saying Leo was autistic? She was very much his right hand girl in the 2018 referendum and he pushed her candidacy for Dublin Bay North in 2020. Fine Gael was incensed
Varadkar is just on an ego trip. His decisions seem only to spring from that. Applause from abroad makes it all the better.
If you were born and live in Ireland and don’t agree with him you’ll get an unpleasant label and go in the bin.
There’s a hierarchy I have observed. It seems to me Emmanuel Macron imitates Xavier Bettel (currently deputy PM of Luxembourg; previously PM. Don’t laugh. At least 3 Luxembourgeois premiers have gone on to head the European Commission). Justin Trudeau imitates Macron. Varadkar imitates to Trudeau. The replication gets worse and worse through the characters involved.
Thank you unherd
Good article
Irish media have been appalling.
Just one correction
The Irish elite haven’t become more outward looking, we were always a country that influenced the world, even going back to the monks
The composition of the elite has changed, its now composed of low IQ simpletons with gender studies degrees.
Whilst the British struggle to get their politicians to end mass migration, at least they have the legal powers to do so.
Rishi Sunak could say tomorrow that he is going to limit visas to 100k per annum and that would be that.
It is not so straight forward for EU countries.
Ireland must accept a) any EU citizen that chooses to move there – which of course includes any recent arrival to any EU country that is subsequently given citizenship, b) a % of the asylum seekers landing in Italy, Spain, Greece etc under the new migrant sharing scheme and c) anyone who winds up in Ireland and claims asylum whether the enter legally or illegally and d) the skilled immigrants that they actually want to attract.
That is not the full story. While there is an EU Freedom of Movement, there is no legal requirement to support and house people indefinitely, something which appears to be happening in Ireland. There is also the ‘pull’ of social welfare amounts which are in many cases twice the European (and UK) figures. We have a problem (dare I say Heuston!)
The pull factors are important – the biggest of all is that Ireland speak English but the levels of welfare is also an attraction.
But my point is that even if every other Irishman rioted and the government eventually capitulated, they couldn’t do anything to stop the flow beyond tinkering. Irish immigration policy is governed at a European, not a national, level.
We have reached the point where most immigrants are not from the EU, there are more Brazilians in Ireland than Portuguese, I’m seeing a large number of Somalis in Dublin now, why ?
The EU isn’t the cause of our immigration problem, its the fault of our ruling class, its the same with the UK, You left the EU, but you still have the same clowns running the circus, so of course they increased immigration
The clowns are similar but your clowns cannot stop the flow but wouldn’t if they could, ours can stop it tomorrow but choose not to.
The Danes have been effective at limiting immigration despite being similarly constrained by law. Ditto Poland and Hungary. The reality is that a national government has all the effective power to control the ‘pull’.
I think those often quoted examples are bogus. No one wants to migrate to Poland and Hungary. They want to go to Western Europe and the Anglosphere. That where the streets are paved with gold.
Denmark is interesting because it is often held up as having cracked the problem by being unwelcoming to immigrants. But it tried and failed to set up a Rwanda scheme (anticipating the legal challenges). This suggests to me that they are as worried as all the other countries and have no solution to deport illegal immigrants. France is known for being unwelcoming too but they have had many more illegals than the UK so I suspect the Danes have all the problems everyone else has. Though I’d be interested to hear anyone with first hand knowledge.
Here in the States there isn’t much pull at all. There is almost zero safety net. No welfare to speak of. People come here to work. The result is:
a) They assimilate fast; it’s the only way to get a better job. b) They’re too busy working to make much trouble, and c) They’re chasing the American Dream; the car, the house, wife/husband, kids. Before you know it they’re middle-aged and just too tired for riots.
They almost always turn out to be good citizens.
Still, all things considered, the numbers have grown outrageously. We definately need to get back to a more reasonable level.
It’s the same story across the Anglosphere, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the destruction is deliberate.
In response to a recent UnHerd article about Canada, I looked up the World Bank statistics on foreign-born population.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?locations=CA-GB-US-AU-NZ-IE
The data only runs to 2015, but even then Ireland was at 16%. Australia is at 28.2%!
A lot depends on where the migrants come from, of course, so Britain and Ireland are likely in a worse position than Australia and New Zealand, despite lower percentages.
The Great Replacement is real.
Yes, it’s strange how all Anglo countries seem to be following the same script:
Designate ‘whiteness’ as evil.
Replace historic pride with a narrative of evil colonial oppression.
Neutralize those who disagree with the narrative by labelling them far-right extremists.
Divide society along gender, racial, and sexual identity lines. This makes it easier to sort people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in order to ignore dissenters.
Substitute universal justice for social justice so that laws punish those who resist the narrative.
Hollow out once-supportive institutions so that they become extractive ‘gravy trains’ for fellow travellers in the managerial class.
Substitute Christian morality for woke morality.
Elevate sexual deviance to the highest ‘good’. Those who follow their vices are much easier to control than the spiritually virtuous.
Demoralize and madden the populace through media lies and propaganda.
Use the education system to groom children so that they turn to the state for parenting rather than their ‘phobic and bigoted’ biological parents.
The West is hurtling toward totalitarian rule spearheaded by a political class and their useful idiots that hold nothing but sheer contempt for the electorate.
One part of the problem is the current government’s neoliberal convictions, on a par with the British government’s neoliberal convictions during the Potato Famine, and with the same results.
The government is sitting on a huge trove of tax receipts from the likes of Google, Meta, Apple, X, etc, and is even fighting the EU to argue Apple should not owe Ireland a further €13 billion in taxes.
On the other hand, the government refuses to spend this money on housing, energy, health care, schools, public transport – all in dire need of investment, and all affecting Irish as much as new arrivals.
The jobs are in Dublin, but housing and daily life in Dublin are swingeingly expensive by any standards. Refugees and immigrants are housed in remote rural locations, where there are no jobs, no services, no public transport, and no facilities.
Busting the insurance cartel, for instance, which denies insurance at affordable rates for practically any business, would pave the way for many new small- and medium-sized businesses. But again, the government’s neoliberal convictions forbids it from “interfering” with business.
This seems to me to be the most salient issue: the ongoing failure of the Irish government to address housing provision and overall affordability is immiserating its population to the point where sensitivity to large migrant populations is heightened, especially among the lower quartiles of the income and wealth distributions where the burden of immigration is felt most strongly as a form of labour competition, something liberal urban elites are rudely insensitive to at best, and complicit in perpetuating at worst — after all more immigration means cheaper nannies, gardeners, Uber drivers, food delivery workers, etc.
And what is true here of Ireland is also true in other Western nation states — which establishment political parties ignore at their peril.
A lot of the sound and fury around immigration from both sides is just noise.
The signal is the undeclared arms race between western liberal democratic countries to attract immigrants for one simple reason: our fertility rates are well below replacement level but our economic model depends on having increasing numbers of productive people to pay for all the unproductive people, especially retirees who are living much longer and make up a much bigger proportion of the population than at any previous time.
I’ve only had time to read the abstract of Philip Pilkington’s paper (linked in the article above) but he appears to summarise the problem well in his description of the “Demographic Trilemma”: either we birth more children indigenously, accept more immigrants, or abandon economic growth.
I guess there is another option^, at least hypothetically, which is to adapt our economies in some way to be sufficiently productive with fewer people. For example, through technology. But right now we are a long way from such a scenario being plausible.
^ Its possible this is discussed in the linked paper but not in the abstract.
I really don’t think Irish I immigration policy, such as it is, has anything to do with fertility rates. The Irish birth rate is still greatly in excess of the death rate. Immigration is a drag on GDP per head. A generous work visa scheme could provide all the workers the economy could possibly need. What the government has done is to apply an open door approach to hundreds of thousands of incoming asylum seekers and economic migrants on top of this, while setting some of the highest and most open ended welfare entitlements in the world. There is no economic rationale for this. One can only conclude that ministers and senior officials think going along with this will benefit their own career prospects in the EU, NGOs and elsewhere, and the national interest can go hang.
“I really don’t think Irish I immigration policy, such as it is, has anything to do with fertility rates. The Irish birth rate is still greatly in excess of the death rate.”
You need a Total Fertility Rate of 2.10 to indigenously maintain a given population. The Republic of Irelands TFI has been below 2.1 since 2008 and currently stands at 1.7.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=IE
But the problem is that the people coming in claim and stay on benefits paid for by taxes so they are not contributing that much to the economy. More children indigenously would be the answer, but this would need to be incentivized or at least be less financially punitive. Maybe if Western countries adopted a points system for viable migrants this would solve the problem somewhat.
That’s not actually true. 83% of EU-born immigrants to the UK and 72% of non-EU-born immigrants work. Compared with 75% of UK-born people.
Of course there is the matter of undocumented migrants who don’t show up on the Labour Force Survey, but they won’t be claiming benefits either because then they would be documented. Plus if they are earning money on the informal economy then they are at least contributing to economic growth in the sense that they will be circulating value around the formal economy, e.g. buying food from the supermarket.
Then there are asylum seekers who it is true don’t work (because for the most part they aren’t allowed to) while receiving financial support in the form of accomodation etc. But they make up well under 10% of total UK immigrants, so aren’t a large enough group to disprove the basic point.
Yes but this is easier said than done because of the demographic rule which we see apply so often that to all intents and purposes it can be treated as a universal principle: where women are given rights, free choices, education etc and improved healthcare increases childhood survival sufficiently, those societies have fewer children and they have them later in life.
I’ve nothing much against incentivising people to have children, but its ideologically dodgy territory for liberal democracies to get into. For left wing governments it smells a bit too much like Handmaid’s Tale type control over women’s reproductive rights. For right wing governments it is often the same people complaining about their taxes paying for immigrants who will then complain about their taxes paying for other people to have too many kids.
I’ve never seen the problem with a points-based system. Even the supposedly progressive paradise which is Canada has one. Yet whenever it is suggested for the UK, the political left goes off the deep end. Bizarre stuff.
But yes, if you don’t want to abandon a growth-based economy and you’re not going to make enough kids indigenously, then the choice is effectively between managed migration, on the one hand, and uncontrolled migration on the other.
The first job is to recognise that’s the real debate. Not the tribal slanging match between No Borders and Build The Wall in which both sides are equally detached from reality.
Of course migrants are more likely to work, as they are far more likely to be working age. In 2021, 70% of the foreign born were aged 26-64, compared to 48% of the UK born. But they won’t stay working age forever, and unless they are high earners and substantial taxpayers, they may not cover the cost of public services and extra infrastructure requirements caused by the rise in population they trigger.
Taxes they directly pay matter for the government’s day by day accounts obviously.
But it’s the economic activity which a growing population generates that’s the main thing. GDP doesn’t measure volume of money as such, it measures the movement of money around the economy because each transaction transfers value to the recipient who then transfers it on to the next, with the government typically getting a cut each time (VAT, PAYE etc).
A better criticism is actually that it’s a giant ponzi scheme. Each generation needs more people in the next generation to cover the costs of more non-productive years as we live longer. Eventually you run out of space or sources of productive people (world population will peak at some point) or hit some other kind of growth ceiling.
Hypothetically at least this may be the case and there are various theories about what post-growth economies would or should look like, including technology plugging the gap and living without economic growth, which typically implies some sort of centrally managed respurce distribution.
It sounds like Ireland is having a kind of 2004-Tony Blair moment.
I am afraid I got rather side-tracked by the writer’s paper on immigration linked in the article https://www.arc-research.org/research-papers/the-demographic-trilemma
Disagreeing completely with the thesis “Who are you hoping will pay for your pension in your old age? The children of today are the wealth creators of tomorrow,” which seems to me no longer relevant in an age of globalism, robots and AI, somewhat coloured any view I may have otherwise taken of the article
People should be saving for their own pensions and not borrowing from future generations. This is what a properly designed pensions system does (e.g. Singapore). It’s the only way that’s remotely sustainable. As opposed to the bastardised pyramid scheme mess we’ve constructed.
There is some truth in the above, but the writer fails to mention the influence of the EU’s elites, of whom the ruling parties and columnists like Fintan O’Toole are willing servants. The far right exists in Ireland, but has been made into liberal bogeymen in the same way that communists used to be Catholic bogeymen.
Ireland will become the Islamic Republic of Ireland in the next 20 years. Anyone taking bets?
Yes, however much you are willing to lose.
Let’s parlay that with a bet on you being a right wing clown who knows nothing about Ireland! I can’t lose!
Coming from behind the pack, perhaps it will be Ireland that is the first country in Europe to become an emirate. Sheesh, I put my money on Sweden.
There are unique aspects to Ireland’s demography. The country has a soceo-economic pact based on FDI and EU membership. It is creating a jobs boom. Currently, 1 in 4 (25%) of all jobs are held by foreign-born migrants. The latest 2023 Q3 labour-force survey (July-September) show that of the 100,000 new jobs created year on year, slightly more than 50% went to migrants. Young Irish emigrate in good and bad times in significant numbers to gain experience and are replaced by immigrants. The birth rate among indigenous Irish has collapsed to at or below replacement while that of immigrants remains higher. If these trends continue, Ireland’s population will be minority indigenous white in little more than a generation. There is public support for this soceo-economic pact because it is creating a lot of wealth. The Gini coefficient on income inequality sits in the middle of the Western European table, better than the UK and US. No political representatives at national Legisaluture level advocate restrictions on immigration. None. It’s actually an amazing success story in a mere generation.
To fully understand what is happening in Ireland we must understand some key aspects of our national psychopathology. The Irish population has seen very rapid change and growth in individual wealth. But underlying this is an unspoken anxiety and insecurity about whether others perceive us as being “modern”. We greatly fear being thought of as backwards, rural, traditional, conservative as indeed we were in the past. This leads to an obsession with embracing every idea regarded as modern which is one reason we are so woke. It’s not just the elite who are woke, the whole country is. The second issue is our groupthink and conformism. There is no diversity of media in Ireland. Only official views may be aired in the media. Many topics are off limits for discussion and up until very recently immigration and refugees was one of them. This also finds expression in our slavish conformism to every letter of EU law and regulation. We delight in informing others that this or that proposal would be against EU rules. Many countries obey EU rules but none experience the joy of obedience as we do.
“In a recent paper on immigration, fertility rates and demographic change, the demographer Paul Morland and I highlighted that no country had successfully integrated more than 15% of foreign-born people. We argued that anything over 15% was highly experimental, and Ireland has proved our argument for us.”
And Australia (about 30% born overseas) disproves that argument.
Worth saying that 1/3rd of that 30% are either from the UK or New Zealand.
If that’s the case, then 20% – well above the magic 15% – aren’t. And presumably some of Ireland’s foreign-born residents or citizens are also from comparable places such as England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia, New Zealand…
Anyway, the writer didn’t offer any qualification; he just said that more than 15% have never been integrated successfully.
It may well be that the clash of the receiving culture and the cultures the immigrants bring with them is potentially dangerous, but again, the writer doesn’t say that, he just spouts a lot of crap about American liberalism. And he notes the Ukrainian component of the recent influx without pursuing it; I doubt there were any Ukrainians among the rioters.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you Geoff, just adding some colour. And I think the Aussie’s have handled immigration better than any other country. They are the only one I know of that got on top of the illegal immigration problem and they have a tough points-based system for legal immigration. In fact Britain post-Brexit has emulated their system (and are attempting to copy Nauru with the Rwanda scheme).
Of course the Aussie population were broadly in favour of expanding the population, whilst the British (and Irish) were never consulted and are dead-set against.
Wrote a fairly detailed reply which is “Awaiting for Approval” (sic.). Will write a modified version tomorrow if it doesn’t get through.
This is the key point, and your estimate is about right.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022) says
Total Australian-born 18,332,620
Total foreign-born 7,680,450
England 961,370
New Zealand 586,020
Italy 161,560
Scotland 125,030
United States 112,580
Germany 104,710
Hong Kong 112,520
South Korea 108,810
So that’s 27% from Western countries and 30% from prosperous countries with broadly Western values.
They may also be more selective about the people they accept from other countries.
Of course, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have always been settler countries. People from a wide range of mostly-European backgrounds are responsible for the prosperity they enjoy today.
The transition is most painful for Britain and Ireland because these are *homeland* countries.
Do the Scottish have broadly Western values? 🙂
Those with the wit and wherewithal to escape Scotland probably do.
I lost touch with this thread for various reasons, so you probably won’t read this reply, but still…
Very interesting figures! But presumably the figures for some non-Western, and not uniformly prosperous ,countries would also be quite high? My guess would be India, Vietnam, Lebanon and China? (The figures for the last would include a large cohort of international students, who may or may not leave after completing their studies).
Surely that only makes sense if it’s defined over a given time frame – i.e. it’s the rate per time that matters and not the absolute accumulated percentage.
Indeed! But the writer isn’t interested in any nuances like that, he just claims that no country has ever integrated more than 15% successfully.
Anyway, Australia’s population in 1945 was less than 7.5 million, and now it’s about 26 million. Of course, the sexual prowess of Australian men is admired all over the world, but even that can’t account for an increase of such magnitude. We do immigration, and we make it work.
Well, you can’t expect any sort of scientific rigour from the commentariat.
Not sure quite why you’re getting all the downvotes. Its’ a fact that the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were built on immigration and have been huge successes (so far – let’s hope you haven’t forgotten how to make it work).
It’s probably not a coincidence that both Australia and Canada operate points-based immigration systems and try to select on quality (and why on earth wouldn’t you if people are queueing up to come and you have limited places and the opportunity to chose ?). We just don’t take it seriously in the UK.
But Australia’s probably a rather different scenario than absorbing the same level of immigration into an older country with a more established history and culture.