You hardly have to be a card-carrying member of the Touchy-Feely-I-Share-Your-Pain-Party to worry deeply about our treatment of illegal immigrants. For let us call a spade a spade here. They are illegal immigrants, but because of our antiquated laws on immigration they have to masquerade as something they are not: asylum-seekers.
I don't blame them for doing that; it's exactly what we would do in their circumstances. We have given them no choice. We have said to them: if you want proper work permits here you must lie about your political status. You must say to our immigration officers that if you return to your own country you will be tied in a hessian sack and thrown in the sea, that your children will be covered in honey and fed to bears. And then when you say that, our immigration officers reply: But there is no hessian in your country, and you have no sea. Nor have you bears. Application dismissed. Next.
Inverted logic
We know this land well. It was designed by Kafka, but perfected by purely Hibernian genius. Is it surprising in this world of inverted logic that only seven out of 5,500 "asylum-seekers" were actually granted asylum in the past year? Of course it isn't. It isn't asylum which they actually want. They want jobs, but they can't lawfully get them, even though employers everywhere are howling for workers.
Foreigners coming to Ireland illegally do not forfeit their human rights at the point of arrival. On the one hand, we will not let them work or give them visas. On the other, they must survive. They become charges of the State, and in their despair, in their determination to keep their places in the queue for legality, they sleep in the streets. It is simply appalling.
The Minister opposes PD proposals to give work visas to immigrants (as I say, let us call a spade a spade). He declares that they would give the impression to the illegal traffickers of human cargo that if people are smuggled into Ireland, they will automatically get work visas.
This would be some kind of answer if there were a legal way for foreigners to work here, as Irish people have sought work around the world. But this would require a policy with coherent rules, which would have to be understood and enforced; and in the creation of virtually any policy and its implementation, whether in the creation of laws surrounding the consumption of alcohol, the management or traffic or even the issuing of dog licences, there is neither coherent will nor implementable policy. What we seem best at is dodging issues.
Parasites
Instead of policy, we have a series of incomprehensible and improvised ad hoc rules which would defeat a smugness of SCs, never mind a family of monophone Somalis who came here to escape poverty and despair, and who want to work, learn English and get ahead. To be sure, there will be parasites on our welfare state, but that is an issue which should have been tackled long ago. We have not shown the political will to crack down on dole fraudsters because every Minister in charge is terrified of being smeared with the Thatcherite.
brush.
So be it. It is time to take that brush out of the cupboard and give it a good airing. What are we to make of the farce of Limerick? Nearly 7,000 people are registered as unemployed there, yet 150 Spaniards were flown into Shannon the other weekend to make a dent on the crippling labour shortage in local factories. No doubt some of the 7,000 on the dole in the region are unemployable; some are stupid, incompetent, burntout. But all 7,000?
While we have a welfare state which disburses largely unregulated money without regard to the rules, of course we live in terror of the consequences of immigration. It's bad enough to have those rules flouted by hundreds of thousands of Irish people; to have the possibility of them being flouted by vast numbers of immigrants properly fills our politicians with terror.
Mortality contest
This the legacy of the insane Seventies and Eighties, when we entered a morality contest with the British (though it was one the British were unaware of). We sought to build a bigger and better welfare state, even though our per capita GDP was about half that of the British, our taxes were ruinous and the best and brightest were fleeing the land. A cretinous populism prompted government to give free travel and free television licences to the old, regardless of income. In reality, many retired people, with their mortgages paid off, their children grown up and earning, with handsome pensions and sitting on properties worth small fortunes, are among the wealthiest people in Ireland. To give such prosperous people free anything - thereby increasing the net value of the estates which they will bequeath to their families - is economic idiocy.
Some day, somehow, some government is going to have to end that financial insanity, and in the process court huge unpopularity. In the meantime, we are saddled with a profligately generous welfare state which still encourages dole fraud and rewards native indolence, even while we are driving enterprising, energetic, and work-hungry foreigners away from an employment market which desperately needs them. It is shaming.