The building migrant crisis in Ireland is becoming a key election issue within the country’s politics, research from a major polling company has claimed.
Data gathered by Ireland’s Red C Research polling group appears to indicate that public disquiet over the country’s ongoing migrant crisis is becoming a key election issue, with just under half of those surveyed saying that the Irish government is doing a poor job at handling the crisis.
While the issue barely registered within the country’s politics 12 months ago, the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers last year has caused significant problems within the country of only 5 million people.
Despite the overwhelmingly left-wing media in the country running numerous articles trying to control the narrative on the issue, it appears that the general public is losing their patience, with 49 per cent of those polled saying that the government is doing a bad job of handling the crisis.
“[T]he idea that another 80,000 refugees may come to Ireland in 2023 is surely only going to increase pressure on government, with the immigration issue perhaps now much more important than it had been in past elections,” Richard Colwell, the chief executive of Red C Research, wrote in the Business Post on Sunday.
The company also showed that there was rapidly diminishing tolerance for the government bypassing planning permission to house migrants, with 45 per cent saying that they would not support the state using emergency powers in order to build modular housing for Ukrainians.
By contrast, 67 per cent of respondents backed such housing being built via emergency powers for the purpose of housing the Irish homeless population, which has ballooned in recent years.
Overall, while the dissatisfaction over immigration is likely to cause trouble for the current government, the pollsters predict that the crisis poses the greatest danger for the opposition Sinn Féin party, which has been relatively supportive of Ireland’s open borders policies despite their own supporters suffering as a result of it.
“Levels of disagreement are highest among those in society who are more under pressure, those with less income or in more deprived areas, the less well educated, and crucially those who plan to vote for Sinn Féin,” Colwell wrote.
This appears to be bourne out by recent protests against the housing of migrants in various working-class areas, with signs labelling party leader Mary Lou McDonald a “traitor” becoming a common sight within these demonstrations.
Backlash in certain areas of the country has also allegedly gone beyond the political realm, with the Irish Times reporting one migrant camp in Dublin as being attacked by masked men with dogs, sticks, and baseball bats.
Others have challenged the facts in relation to the publication’s reporting of the attack however, with the editor of another news outlet, Gript Media, claiming that there are “remarkable holes” in the migrant attack story.
“There is no footage of the attack. There is no footage of the attackers. There is no footage of the aftermath of any attack,” publication editor John McGuirk wrote in an opinion piece published on Monday. “The Irish Times, we are told, actually interviewed several of the attackers, but did not record them, or get them on camera. There is no evidence of anything other than the existence of the migrant camp itself.”
“I do not know the reasons for this, but as an editor myself, let me tell you: If [Gript journalists were] on the scene of an incident like this and failed to get any publishable footage at all, they would be in the doghouse, to put it very mildly,” he went on to write.