COUNTY VIEW: Rolling back the welcome mat

There is nothing like an election – or, at the present time, a series of them – to concentrate political minds. The immigrant crisis may have caught the Government by surprise, but there is little doubting the intent to stem the rising public resentment, merited or not, at what is unfolding. The Fianna Fáil euro hopeful, Barry Cowen, has observed that while at the start of his campaign, the issue arose on only one in eight doorsteps, it is now raised on every second.

When Ireland opened its doors to the first wave of Ukrainians fleeing their homeland in 2022, we offered support more generous than any of our peers. An open-ended promise of accommodation, full social welfare payments, medical care and education were ahead of what other, more cautious states were offering. Little did we realise then that not only would there be 100,000 Ukrainians in the country, but that in addition, an estimated 50,000 asylum seekers would be applying for refuge by the end of this year.

The result has seen the rolling back of the welcome mat and a more hardline approach designed to reduce the ‘pull factor’, or the attractiveness of Ireland as a refugee destination.

Since March, new arrivals have been restricted to accommodation for 90 days, with a weekly allowance of €38.80, as against the full social welfare payment of €232.

That policy change seems to have worked, with a noticeable reduction in the number of new arrivals. But the problem for the Government was that this was only one side of the coin.

The recent arrival of more asylum seekers – given impetus by the British Rwanda policy – has seen the unsightly appearance of a tented Dublin shanty town on the leafy banks of the canal, simply because there is no accommodation to house them. And each attempt at a clean up results in a mushroom like re-emergence of new tents and new migrants in days.

The Government solution is something of a crude one. From next month, the 27,000 Ukrainians still in State accommodation will have their benefits reduced to €38.80, to be restored to €232 when they find their own accommodation. Quite how they are expected to do so in the middle of a housing crisis is not explained, but the strategy seems to be to free up State accommodation to house the currently homeless international protection applicants.

The proposal has drawn severe criticism from both the UN and the home-based humanitarian groups whose remit it is to care for Ukrainian refugees. Their fear is that the end result will be the forced return to Ukraine of the most vulnerable – the elderly, women and children who have little hope of sourcing new accommodation.

The current migration system is, by common consent, a total mess. It may well be a case of our own misplaced generosity coming back to bite us. It took a particular form of complacency to grant protection to some 80 percent of applicants when the European average was half that. And when we threw open the doors in 2022, we hardly thought that the rate of applications from Georgia, already declared a safe country, would go from 300 to 2,700.

Few could have predicted, even five years ago, that immigration could become an Irish electoral issue. But a perfect storm of international displacement, a domestic housing crisis and a hardening of attitudes in Britain has left us with few answers. Our only response has been to roll up the welcome mat. It is a strategy that goes against the grain of our national instincts. But as of now, it is the only strategy we have.