Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I send my sympathy and solidarity to the peoples of Kurdistan, Türkiye and Syria.

If you go online, open the newspaper or turn on the radio, you cannot do any of those things these days without reading or hearing about the far right. They have come to prominence through their organisational support for anti-refugee protests, but who are they?

The largest such party is the National Party. It is described by the Far Right Observatory as being anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+, and white nationalist. Its leader has attended meetings of European neo-Nazi groups. The observatory lists about a dozen such groups and remarks that many have adopted the great replacement conspiracy theory which argues that white populations are being deliberately displaced from their homelands as part of a plot often blamed on Jews or globalists. Hardcore racists in some of these groups have tried to promote the racist myth of a link between black and brown men and the incidence of gender-based violence. These groups have never displayed any concern for the victims of gender-based violence before and are simply trying to exploit the issue for racist ends.

An opinion piece by Justine McCarthy in The Irish Times last week, entitled “Government needs to acknowledge its role in creating anti-migrant tinderbox”, said the following, "The spurning of economic immigrants arriving on Irish shores while seeking special status for Ireland’s own ... emigrants abroad is the sort of 'do ... [as] I say, not ... [as] I do' double standard that gives succour to xenophobic agitators worming their ideology of hate into the public mindset." I could add that a Government which boasts about deporting nearly 130 people in January and signs this country up to a fortress Europe policy that has resulted in nearly 25,000 men, women and children drowning in the Mediterranean in the past ten years only helps to feed an anti-refugee narrative that the far right taps into.

It is on the issue of housing, however, that this Government has handed the racists their number one gift. The Government’s housing policy has forced record numbers into emergency accommodation, it has sat idly by as 50,000 houses were left vacant for six years or more, and it has allowed speculators to hoard vast tracts of land in the middle of a housing emergency.

It is, of course, in large measure true that refugees and those hardest hit by the housing crisis are not competing for the same spaces. I preface the following comment, however, by saying unambiguously that refugees are welcome here. When many people compare the efforts this Government has made to house Ukrainian refugees, inadequate as those efforts are in many respects, with the lack of effort and urgency in housing the victims of this housing crisis, they feel aggrieved and the door opens up for the racist messaging of the far right, facilitated by this Government. Do you, Deputy Varadkar, accept that your Government’s appalling failures on the housing issue have given a real gift to the far right in this country, and what do you intend to do now to undo the damage that you and your Government have done?

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