A chara, – When reading Finn McRedmond’s “Hot takes on the Dublin riots by Russell Brand, Steve Bannon and Brexit Britain are hard to take” (Opinion & Analysis, December 7th), I had to wonder whether your writer has access to a parallel universe in which an alternate version of Britain and Brexit exist.
To argue an “unrecognised quality of Brexit” has “forced discussion of difficult and divisive issues” that “actually stopped resentment festering” is a take of such blistering hotness that Thursday’s edition of The Irish Times really should have come with a pair of safety gloves for readers.
Perhaps your columnist did not have the benefit, at the time of going to print, of realising that Britain’s immigration minister had resigned his position because his government’s proposed replacement of its shameful Rwanda policy “did not go far enough”.
However, surely she noticed the revolving door of prime ministers, each of which faltered in part due to their inability to deliver the radical and unrealistic changes to migration policy that Brexit promised but which often had nothing to do with EU membership? Or the explicit plans of British governments to break their own and international laws in service of realising those fantasies? How about the serious uptick in far-right nationalist violence, fuelled – many would argue – by the increasingly divisive and dog-whistle rhetoric of the very politicians who brought us Brexit?
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Discussions about migration have been ongoing in Ireland for a very long time; hardly a surprising feature of a country with a diaspora 10 times the size of its population. How we discuss the topic could certainly do with some improvements, with an injection of a good degree more compassion, empathy and humanity.
However, to claim that a Brexit-style discussion of migration would aid Ireland is to tragically confuse an exemplary model with a cautionary tale. – Is mise,
JOHN HOGAN,
Ballyneety,
Co Limerick.