Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar sounded an awful lot like Mother Malachy when she found that a bunch of us sixth formers were spending the hour before Latin class in a nearby pub. “You’ve brought shame on the convent and your parents,” she growled, ignoring protestations that we were only drinking coffee.
Varadkar said the hundreds of rioters who trashed central Dublin recently had “brought shame on Ireland”. Perhaps 823 years of colonisation makes you obsess a bit about what outsiders think. The Irish government wants the world — well, mainly the Brussels and Washington crowd — to continue to buy into the notion that Ireland is “a grand little” country. Sure, didn’t they take on a crippling amount of debt in 2010 instead of going down the default route, which would have knocked over a few of the big German banks? And aren’t they dealing well with the surge in immigration and the cost-of-living crisis?
But right now, 102 years after independence, almost the last thing the Irish should be concerned with is what anyone, other than those living there, thinks of the country.
Varadkar has taken the go-to explanation for all political disruption in Europe, blaming the far Right.
Drew Harris, commissioner of Ireland’s police (Garda Síochána), was a little less restrained. He said it was down to a “lunatic hooligan faction driven by far-Right ideology”. Varadkar didn’t mention their sanity, but agrees the protesters and looters were part of far-Right groups responding to a horrific stabbing incident earlier in the day.
Which means everything is sort of OK. The government doesn’t have to do anything serious, like interrogate its economic and social policies. All it has to do is clamp down on everyone’s freedom. And that is what it intends doing. The day after the riots, Varadkar promised that legislation that is described as the most draconian censorship in Europe, will be accelerated and passed through the Dáil (parliament) within weeks.
Swathes of Dublin’s city centre have been no-go areas for years as feral youths, emboldened by the lack of police presence, prowl the streets for victims
The new law will allow police to search laptops and phones for anything that may be deemed “offensive or hateful”. There’s a potential sentence of five years in jail for anyone found guilty.
Luckily for most Irish, as became clear during the riots, the police are so understaffed that implementation of the law might be lax — unless the police, who are also underequipped, reckon their safest option is to loiter around the richer suburbs checking on laptops and avoiding the seriously dangerous urban areas. Swathes of Dublin’s city centre have been night-time no-go areas for years as feral youths, emboldened by the lack of police presence, prowl the streets for victims. It’s a situation that was bad pre-Covid but became critical during and after the pandemic.
The police force is just one area the Irish government has failed to invest in adequately, especially since the global financial crisis. General community services, child care, schooling, health and, perhaps most critically, housing have suffered from lack of investment and attention.
The housing shortage is so acute that few young people, even middle class, have a chance of buying their own property, and renting is so expensive that many live with their parents until they are well into their 30s.
The shortage of medical facilities means more people end up in hospital emergency departments, where insufficient staff levels and the shortage of beds result in overcrowding and in life-threateningly long delays. A visit to a GP costs €60, which all but the very poor have to pay.
And then there’s immigration. For the first 70 years of Ireland’s independence not even the Irish wanted to live in the country. The huge levels of emigration began to change in the late 1990s thanks to an aggressive tax regime that attracted the world’s largest multinational companies. By 2023 official statistics revealed that 20% of Ireland’s 5-million residents were born elsewhere. Without them Ireland would probably not rank as the “most competitive” country in the eurozone and the second (to Denmark) “most competitive” in the world.
It’s difficult to understand why some of the highest-paid politicians in the world haven’t worked out that the surge in numbers would put huge additional pressure on the system. Perhaps it’s because the country has had the same two parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil running the country since independence.
Sinn Féin, which has been working hard to look more like Fianna Fáil, is expected to win next year’s election. But unless it addresses the deep impact of more than a decade of inept management, the country will remain a tinder box, susceptible to outbreaks by frustrated, angry citizens who may or may not be right-wing.
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