 |
DUBLIN – Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald will have to negotiate a delicate path around a new topic: immigration, if she is to become Ireland’s next prime minister.
Tensions over Ireland’s overwhelming refugee system have risen to the top of the political agenda following the race riots in Dublin and are currently on the agenda for all political parties ahead of elections later this year.
While the centrist factions of Ireland’s coalition government face their own backroom tensions over immigration policy, it is the main opposition party that is most at risk of splitting its support base and losing support to its right-wing rivals.・It is thought to be a fein.
Such a development would weaken Sinn Féin, which is on the verge of a historic breakthrough for the Republic of Ireland. The country appears poised to seize power for the first time after decades of expansion from its longtime stronghold in neighboring Northern Ireland. Ireland’s Republican Party, with its anti-establishment message and strong working-class roots, has held a commanding lead in every opinion poll since 2020, but as public anxiety grows over a surge in immigration. This advantage may be lost.
Unusually for a European nationalist party, Sinn Féin is primarily targeting votes on the crowded left of Ireland’s political divide, rather than on the more vacant right. Opinion polls show that many of his traditional supporters are fleeing for a harder line on Ireland. Asylum seeker.
Sinn Féin’s popularity has been on the rise since November 23, when an Algerian man stabbed three children and a teacher in central Dublin, sparking violence and vandalism by hundreds of demonstrators chanting bigoted slogans. has fallen below 30% for the first time in two years in a national opinion poll. . Much of the lost support has gone to local independent politicians and right-wing fringe parties, including Sinn Féin exiles who now freely express critical immigration views.
Rank-and-file politicians in Sinn Féin have been internally warned not to post content on social media that runs counter to McDonald’s stance on immigration, which emphasizes the impact on services, in what commentators see as a hardening of the social climate. This reflects a highly sensitive environment in which people tend to jump at anything that comes their way. her position.
Macdonald wants the party to remain focused on housing issues, particularly its main pre-election promise to build tens of thousands of social homes beyond the government’s own expansion pledges.
She sees anti-immigrant sentiment as linked to a soul-crushing struggle to secure affordable housing in a country where property prices and rents are some of the highest in Europe. This market dysfunction reflects Europe’s leading population boom amid tight supplies.
“I share that anger.”
The pace of social change is staggering, especially in the relatively impoverished north of Dublin. Just a generation ago, Ireland’s population was just 3.5 million and there were few immigrants to a country whose largest export was its own people. By contrast, a fifth of today’s approximately 5.3 million residents were born outside Ireland.
The population boom has been fueled by nearly a decade of strong multinational-led economic growth and more recently by the disproportionate admission of 100,000 Ukrainian war refugees and more than 26,000 other asylum seekers. Hundreds of them are currently sleeping in tents in parks and suburbs. street. Starting later this month, the government plans to cut benefits in an effort to reduce the number of new Ukrainians entering the country via other EU countries, where benefits are lower.
“If you’re someone who can’t afford a home, or your son or daughter can’t afford a home, and you think that more people are coming to this country, you would rightly say, ” Now, how am I going to be accommodated? ” McDonald told the Business Post. The latest in this interview series portrays anti-immigrant sentiment as both understandable and unfair.
“I share the same anger about housing,” she said. “But that’s the government’s responsibility, not the new people coming into the state.”
This is a discussion MacDonald and party leaders are having behind the scenes with their supporters, whose anti-immigrant sentiment is clearly identified by pollsters, even if it is not acknowledged on Sinn Féin’s official platform. It is captured by
The most detailed recent survey of grassroots opinion across political parties found that Sinn Féin voters were the most anti-immigrant.
While the majority of voters of other parties viewed continued immigration positively, Sinn Féin opposed it. More than 70% said there were too many immigrants, with a majority linking this to “increased crime” and Ireland’s “loss of individuality”. Only 38% of people believe that immigration “benefits the economy.”
These sentiments are exploited by a wide variety of right-wing upstarts. These include Aontu (Unity), a party founded by former Sinn Féin MP Pedal Tobin, and the Rural Independence Party, a loose group of MPs that includes fellow Sinn Féin breakaway Carol Nolan. Two other local independence supporters, in Cork and Limerick, have just established a new party, Independent Ireland, which claims to offer a “comfortable alternative” to Sinn Féin.
Independents may hold the balance of power in the next general election, which must be held by March 2025 but is widely expected to take place in late 2024.
But first of all, these far-right voices and other emerging voices will have an opportunity to build grassroots organizations in June’s local elections, which will run parallel to the European Parliament elections. Potential candidates include an anti-immigrant activist who led a protest outside a vacant property earmarked for housing asylum seekers, some of which was later set on fire.
Police have not filed charges in the arson attacks, which began in 2018 and have escalated in scale and frequency over the past year.
Mr MacDonald, a Dublin resident who succeeded Gerry Adams as Sinn Féin leader in 2018, experienced heckling from far-right activists when attending local group meetings in his constituency in central Dublin. It’s starting to happen. These critics have pledged to field candidates in June’s city council elections, which could give them their first toehold in a democratic system.
Some members support leaving the EU irish liberal partypredict shelter “It will continue to burn.” Unless the government’s immigration policy changes. Some people support the far-right National Party, whose divided leadership is mired in dispute over the ownership of 400,000 euros of gold bars seized by police from party headquarters.
The irony of Irish demonization of immigrants is not lost on government ministers tasked with restoring Ireland’s tourist-centric image. Mile Feilte – “100,000 people are welcome.”
When Nolan tabled a pro-independence anti-immigration motion in Parliament last month, Green Party Integration Minister Roderick O’Gorman recalled how Ireland had “closed its doors” to Jews fleeing the Holocaust. , recalled that such actions should never be taken again, especially considering the millions of people living there.Irish people had been immigrating since the 18th century.th We enter the century in search of a better life.
Mr O’Gorman referred to the motion’s claim that placing “unvetted single men” in rural towns and villages would have “serious potential consequences for residents”, and that opponents would have to use their own family tree He said it should be examined closely.
“Can anyone put his hand on his chest and say that there is not a single man in his family who has never gone abroad in search of work?” he said. “There is an ‘unvetted’ male immigrant in every one of our families. We are lucky as a country that other countries have allowed them to enter and contribute to the system.”