Time for a zero refugee policy? - *Read OP for mod warnings and threadbans - updated 11/5/24*

Funny because that certainly isn't borne out with comments here and elsewhere, or surveys that have been done.

"Do you support refugees" is a very easy question to say "Of course!" to.

"Do you support refugees at the expense of your and your family's access to the same services and supports?" would be more accurate and result in a very different answer!

What you said was “Most people want Ireland to continue to support refugees and that trend will continue.”

Most people do not want this, as evidenced by numerous public polls

What you said is false

It literally means they don’t want us to continue providing support at the current rates of arrival.

I never said anything about people not wanting provide support full stop.

Anyway I’m not sure I’ll bother much further, whatever facts I provide you’ll use your mental gymnastics and disingenuous sophistry to ignore the reality that you’re refusing to accept because it doesn’t match with your view.

From the video above Lagos, one city in Nigeria, has a population of over 15 million people! That's over three times the entire population of Ireland! We're only talking about one , JUST ONE, city in Nigeria.

Ireland is no position to solve the problems of just one of the the source countries of migrants never mind the myriad of places they are coming from.

We're not even getting the poor or destitute of Nigeria. In the main it's the middle classes who have the money to make the journey. (A journey that's never direct and involves changing planes in European cities).

The whole thing is bonkers and completely senseless.

Mmmno you’re being reductive - framing the discussion as a dichotomy of only either our current (malfunctioning) system or a completely unattainable and unrealistic system.

You say it’s binary, but I must say I haven’t the slightest idea of where you’re getting this from.

The majority of opinions I’ve encountered on the matter are in favour of maintaining a degree of support but just not to the level we are currently engaging in (which is excess to our capacity).

We’ve already taken in a huge number of people in a short time, particularly for the size of our country. Even if we were to entirely shut the doors to new comers and maintain helping the existing people that have already arrived we’d still be doing a lot to help.

Exercise our opt out as Denmark did, get our heads above water in terms of service provision for our citizens and then we can reassess when we are in a better and more realistic position to provide substantive help in addition to what we’re already doing.

Did you not know they had cities in Africa?

Not sure what it has to do with this thread though

Yeah, theyre not all paradise.

But whys that my problem.

If 10s of millions can make it work in dozens of different African countries then the options are clearly there.

Find your new home or asylum in Johannesburg, or Luanda, or Lagos, or Kinshasa, or Addis Ababa, or Cairo, or Giza, or Istanbul, or any of the other closer workable options. 10s of millions are living in those places without any need to go to Europe, so why not you.

Not at all, I think any system is capable of improvement and I think Ireland's system has to improve to take account of the fact that our status as a wealthy country will bring more refugee and asylum applications — not to mention the fact that this will not be the last humanitarian crisis we ever face. My point is simply that it is foolish to expect that our system will ever not be prone to some abuse and that the intake of refugees, particularly in times of a crisis, will perpetually be an exemplar of perfect management and exclusively beneficial outcomes for Ireland.

Citing Denmark is all well and good, but it has to be remembered that Denmark's opt out came after having contributed a lot to the handling of refugees over the years. Ireland certainly has more of a valid justification to decrease the numbers it has taken — but this has been an emergency situation despite the apparent view on here sometimes that its some sort of deliberate long term project to continue taking in refugees at the same number we have seen since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

'Perhaps you dont like people knowing just how urbanized and developed Africa is. (And the mid east).'

If people don't know anything about Africa, that's their own ignorance, I'm not sure how you could imagine that they don't!

What moral reasoning exactly would stop people coming to Ireland? I don't doubt for a second that they have some ties to here, family/friends/someone they know here already. Why do you think they come here instead of another country in Africa?

Yes, I would imagine not too many would fancy that, or this one in Algeria

If someone had links or connections anywhere else, I would imagine they would try to go there, rather then refugee camps.

That’s because amongst the mainstream parties they’re likely afraid to take a harder stance on the matter due to the homogeneity of stance amongst the media and very vocal ideologues on social media.

Even very moderate commentary will attract vitriolic groups labelling the transgressor a “racist” and all the other usual and predictable epithets. Look at the hysterical reaction Holly Cairns garnered after making a fairly reasonable tweet commenting on the lack of engagement with communities having asylum seekers bussed in overnight.

They’re not going to publicly stick their heads above the parapet. It’s too risky in the current media environment. Which is also a bit of a worrying trend. Nobody wants their words twisted and to have themselves conflated with the fringe nut jobs in the IFP or NP. Which is precisely what our increasingly less objective and disingenuous media would do.

The election is still a while away. Wait till they start talking to people on their doorsteps, where they can express their opinions openly without fear of committing wrongsspeak. I won’t be surprised at all to see it becoming a more prominent public issue then.

Ooh it's all the big bad meeja's fault? Listen the big beasts in the big parties are more than capable of signalling and dog-whistling on this issue without getting tarred with the racist brush, by anyone credible anyway. See some of the 'Rural Independents' are doing it and nobody is calling them puppets of Justin Barret or whatever.

AFAICS most of the real nastiness in this debate is coming from the other side. Which anti-racist activists have done anything like this?

But this is just a hopelessly narrow way of appreciating how this all works. The whole point of refugees "skipping" countries is that the European nations have resolved among themselves to cooperate on this in order to avoid the scenario where a small group of countries bears the effort alone. If we all adopted a policy of saying "right let France / Italy / Greece etc etc deal with this as they are a safe country" then this is effectively putting all the pressure on those countries. The problem with that of course is that we are part of a co-operative alliance with these countries that has yielded and continues to yield huge benefits for the development of this country. But the term "alliance" does not mean "only accepting the easy beneficial bits and leaving the harder negative aspects to someone else".

As I've said time and time again — any appreciation for how the world works would lead you to understand that we don't get to be a perpetual beneficiary of being plugged into the developed capitalist system with our European allies without accepting that we must also carry burdens with our allies. The idea that refugees should simply only ever be hosted at the exact point where whatever specific danger or strife they faced is out of reach is one of those things that sounds somewhat sensible in simplistic terms but is fairly hopeless when it crashes into the wall of reality.

The unasked question in that poll though is 'how much does it matter to you?'. Like a polling company could ask any bland Yes/No question ("have crisps lost their flavour?', "are neck tattoos a bit icky?") and by the nature of a Yes/No question there will be a majority one way or the other. However, whether it's a big issue (most important, top 5, top 10 factor at election time, potential swing of your vote) is a key bit of information before any political party runs with something.

You may well be proven correct that it is an important issue, but just because a majority answered a particular way in a poll isn't of itself that crucial.

I wasn't claiming they were going to transform the situation I was using them to counter yer man's ridiculous assertion that politicians can't take an immigration-critical stand without being run out of town on a rail. Independents TDs have been doing this for years

and AFAIK there have been no pitchfork wielding mobs outside their homes.