What are your views on Multiculturalism in Ireland? - Threadbanned User List in OP

And meanwhile I have a family member who at 11.25 walked into A&E in the Mater with the recurrence of a medical issue and as of 6.15 pm… had not been admitted… as of that last check in…they are probably still sitting.

arthritis.. check

heart condition.. check

another long term issue which caused their trip to a&e at the behest of their own GP this morning..

but…sure, invite shît loads of people over to share and benefit from already struggling yet critical services like healthcare and make sure they get it for free too…excellent… what an absolute kip of a country.. absolute state of the EU for facilitating it.

Not so, but that doesn’t suit the narrative of your disingenuous position on this matter so you might as well keep going :)

ohh Ok, but let’s invite more pressure on it, by expanding our population in double quick time, expanding it with people who can not pay for it but will benefit free gratis.

call just came..at 21.40, he is coming home.. 11.25 to 21.40

10 hours and 15 minutes, absolutely nuts… but according to our politicians and NGOs we’d like further unlimited arrivals… sweet.

At the risk of being fcuked out of it for extending the analogy in the worst way possible, but throwing in the towel simply isn’t an option. Ireland is in the position it’s in now because Ireland needs immigrants, especially in areas like nursing -

Migrant nurses play a significant role in the Irish health system – 40% of all nurses newly registered in Ireland between 2000 and March 2009 were from outside the European Union (Irish Nursing Board, unpublished data). Some hospitals in the Irish capital have identified 50% to 80% of their nursing staff as migrant. The need for migrant nurses in this system is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, a fact borne out by the fact that many migrant nurses hold permanent jobs within the health system and also by the recent statement from the Manager of the National Recruitment Service that: "There shall continue to be an ongoing need for international nurses mainly in specialist areas".

https://human-resources-health.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1478-4491-7-68

It’s not anyone’s intention to permit scumbags to enter into the country. The intention is to fulfil our international obligations to take in asylum seekers and refugees.

Successive Irish Government have had about the same success as their counterparts in Europe in integrating immigrants into Irish society, because they went about it in the worst way possible in the first place. Instead of making any attempts to integrate immigrants successfully into society, the Irish Government spent billions to keep them holed up in Direct Provision. They were told from the beginning it wouldn’t work and it was a poor long term strategy, but there was easy money to be made from the idea, and private contractors intended to make it. There was foresight involved alright, but it wasn’t the kind of foresight that would offer any benefits to Irish society. It was intended solely for the purposes of making a small handful of people incredibly wealthy.

African immigrants who refuse to participate in the labour market, the small number of them that there are, are not the cause of Ireland’s current economic woes. For that the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the people in power who didn’t just let it happen, they purposely went out of their way to make it happen, to further their own political aims. People complained, and the real canary in the coalmine should’ve been Margaret Cash, and we’re all aware of how she was villified, not for speaking out about the housing conditions which she and thousands of Irish people like her were being expected to endure, but because of her social status in Irish society - people want to complain, but if anyone sticks their head above the parapet, they’re deemed to be unsuitable representatives of the issues people are complaining about.

Not that I relish the thoughts of sharing a bath with Ms. Cash, but in essence that’s what people who are complaining need to do. That’s the only way people are going to notice that there’s water seeping out underneath the door when the water is actually displaced because of the number of people in the bath, regardless of their nationality or social status.

I’ve probably torn the bottom out of that analogy in fairness, but we can’t pull the plug, and we can’t rely on the EU to provide us with any more life buoys, we’ve used up all the good grace we’re likely to get from Europe at this stage, as each country within the EU is now scrapping for themselves and their own citizens like we could end up doing, and putting ourselves in an even worse position.

We did, and we can’t retain them. It’s why we need immigrants to replace the emigrants who are leaving in their droves.

A number of years ago now I was in a position where I was begging some of our best and brightest to stay, and at the same time I knew why they wouldn’t stay - they saw no future here for them and their friends were faring much better abroad.

You can’t expect to retain people when they have no reason to compel them to stay, and there’s no point in suggesting that they should have to sign any contract to stay for any set number of years if their education is funded out of the public purse.

Expecting anyone to stay on the basis of statistics about our fertility rates probably isn’t gonna cut it, particularly as childcare costs have increased exponentially in the last number of years and foreign au pairs aren’t as cheap, or as available to employ for beans and accommodation as they once were -

https://www.aupairireland.ie/blog/category/au-pair-costs-and-expenses

Is there a reason you imagine we can’t do both?

I mean, apart from there being a public outcry every time there’s a strike in the public sector and people start moaning about how much THEY pay in taxes already and how they don’t want to pay for other people’s lifestyle choices…

Apart from all that like.

Not sure what big assumptions are required, unless you mean that you’re assuming that people actually want the changes you obviously see as required, and they’re willing to support your ideas of increasing pay and conditions to retain people who have been trained in this country (I’m not going to muddy the waters by including Irish people who have done their medical training abroad, but Leo immediately springs to mind).

Evidence so far suggests people have no interest in doing so, they complain that employees in the public sectors are being paid too much already, because they read about it in the papers and they don’t see the kind of hours people working in those sectors are actually putting in. Instead they see what they want to see - nurses dare not share a joke among themselves on a 13 hour shift while there are patients backing up on trolleys in the hallways -

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/i-fell-asleep-at-the-wheel-nurses-commuting-home-after-12-hour-shifts-share-their-stories-37347873.html

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40824486.html

I dunno, you’re probably a lot closer to the ground than I am, but every time I’ve had to visit a hospital, I might be waiting a few hours to be seen, and in that time I observe the amount of shyte and stress they have to put up with, and that’s just the frontline staff. There’s all the lab staff too that are under enormous pressure to deliver results and I just think they ought to be cut some slack, and they sure as hell deserve better pay and conditions for what they do, but what does our Government do instead? Completely ignores them, agrees to bung ‘em a few quid by way of a bonus payment, and they’re still waiting for it -

https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/majority-of-frontline-healthcare-workers-still-waiting-for-covid-bonus-41704538.html

I get what you’re saying that everyone’s quality of life is going to continue to decrease, but it simply isn’t true - some people’s quality of life will continue to decrease, and other people’s quality of life will continue to increase. That has a lot to do with our reliance on reducing labour costs and ensuring they stay at as low a level as possible, while extracting the maximum labour from employment.

Pay isn’t being held back by migrant workers, it’s being held back by people who are resentful that “their taxes” are being spent on providing State services which they feel they aren’t personally benefiting from, and that’s why they’re not going to support increasing pay and improving conditions for other people who aren’t them when they feel like they’re being ignored. The likes of Sinn Fein are going to capitalise on the resentment being felt across the country by people who given the first opportunity will send a message to the same politicians who have looked after their own, and that’s when you’ll really see people cutting off their noses to spite their face. I’ve said it before too - people are chomping at the bit to vote for Sinn Fein thinking they’re going to punish the current Government, arguing that Sinn Fein couldn’t do much worse.

They can, and they will. I’d say brace yourself, if you haven’t already, because the next few years are going to be even worse for this country than anything anyone has witnessed before.

1) The vast majority of those who arrived on our shores from beyond the EU pre the birthright loophole closure never saw direct provision. 

That’s a bit vague, but DP was established in ‘99, the birthright loophole was closed five years later. If you’re just referring to non-EU immigrants as a whole, then they weren’t going to be in DP if they weren’t seeking asylum or refugee status -

Direct provision was originally introduced as an emergency measure in 1999. In 2002 there were almost 12,000 applications for asylum. At the start of 2014, there were 4,360 people in direct provision, with more than 3,000 people having been in the system for two or more years. At the same time, there were more than 1,600 people who have spent five or more years in direct provision.

There were approximately 7,400 adults and children living in the 38 direct provision centres across 17 counties in Ireland by the end of April 2020.

In February 2021, the Government of Ireland announced a plan to end direct provision by 2024.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_provision

2) Of course Africans and others not engaging in the labour market are not the cause of our economic woes, but they are adding to them and bringing new intercultural/ethnic woes with them.

Adding to them by how much though? That’s another vague claim that there’s truth to it, but how much of an issue is it really? How much of that is down to how African immigrants are perceived? They’re unlikely to be perceived in the same way Mary O’ Rourke does in that wonderful gaffe way back in 2006 -

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/low-remark-from-a-high-place-1.1001923

3) The inescapable fact is nowhere, not a single European nation, with different histories and different politics and policies, over shorter and longer periods of time, has successively integrated extra EU immigrants into their societies without the exact same trends playing out in every single case. Indeed if we extend the criteria to all the New World ex European colonies founded on immigration(and conquest), they show the exact same trends too.

Not once though, have I ever tried to escape that fact. For all the talk of “importing issues” from other countries, the one thing we have so far somewhat successfully managed to avoid is importing other countries politics. We have our own unique tribalisms, and in determining why there is higher unemployment rates among the black population in Ireland, it isn’t because they’re black -

My models have not accounted for all of the African disadvantage. Even after we take account of individual characteristics, migration related variables and the risk of having participated in the asylum system, Africans still stand out as disadvantaged in the Irish labour market: African women are only about two-thirds as likely to be at work, and more than twice as likely to be unemployed, as their Irish counterparts, and African men also suffer lower employment and higher unemployment rates. In this they differ from other immigrant groups when the range of influential factors are controlled for. In seeking to account for this remaining unexplained African disadvantage we can take note of the previous research findings that Black Africans in Ireland are a great deal more likely than any other immigrant groups to report having experienced discrimination while looking for work (Kingston et al., 2013; Kingston et al, 2015). This would suggest that the disadvantages experienced by Africans in the Irish labour market appear to be due to a combination of restrictive policies the part of the state and discriminatory practices on the part of employers.

https://www.ucd.ie/geary/static/publications/workingpapers/gearywp201816.pdf

Sure, all those years ago we sang and pledged to "feed the world", so long as that "world" didn't show up to our dinner table.

Ain’t that the truth! It’s only funny because it’s the one memory that sticks out in my head in contrast to the way things are now, and the way things were then. It was the school concert in the 80’s and I was one of the children doing blackface to sing that song.

Children nowadays wouldn’t be able to relate, because while finding black children to play the part wouldn’t be a problem, they’d probably be thinking “WTF, I’m telling Twitter about this!”. All I could think of at the time was at least the boot polish disguised my embarrassment 😂