The View from Nowhere
Reviewing Simon Harris's Substack
The Irish government has made a distinct turn in how it talks about immigration and asylum in the last few months, becoming noticeably more critical. The change has been caused by a number of issues, the proximate one being the high spoiled vote percentage in the Presidential election. The negative impact of that phenomenon fell hardest on the legacy parties in government, who interpreted the result as a grave threat (“our voters are pissed off about this and it’s quietly killing us”), but also an intriguing opportunity (“there are votes in this if we play our cards right”).
The kindest thing you can say is that perhaps the government have grudgingly changed their minds, and are changing their tone to, little by little, bring the system to acceptance of restrictionist positions they themselves once decried as far right. A less complimentary (though I think more accurate) way of positioning it is that Fianna Fáil (FF) and Fine Gael (FG) sense people want action but they also know that it would be hard, disruptive and personally embarrassing for their parties, so they are frantically doing everything they can so it seems a crackdown is always only months away, while doing the bare minimum to sustain that illusion, in the hopes that will be enough to keep people quiet until this all blows over (it usually is). In any case, the new position needs to be sold.
It’s in that light that Simon Harris has copied a number of other international political leaders by starting a Substack. (Harris is the leader of Fine Gael, one of the two parties in Government and ostensibly the more conservative one. ) That might seem hypocritical coming from someone who has been so insistent, as Harris has, about the damage social media is doing. I assume he reassures himself that Substack is free of the worst excesses of Twitter - he’s correct that it’s different; despite what you might think about your own little bubble on here, Substack skews hard to to the cultural left, and quick look at the top ten categories indicate it’s default users (both writers and consumers) tend to be activist librarians, romantasy obsessives and Rest is Politics listening hysterics more than anything else.
Harris’s most recent article is titled “Politicians of the Centre Cannot Shirk the Immigration Debate. I Certainly Won’t”. So what’s he saying about Ireland’s immigration policy and where it’s going?
The migration debate cannot be allowed to become more polarised or simply left to the political extremes…
… politicians of the centre cannot shirk the migration debate. Group-think cannot reign supreme and ahead of policy debate, discussion and decision…
… Leadership is recognising when something needs to change and putting in place the mechanisms to facilitate that change. This government is making those changes, from infrastructure to housing to a new migration strategy.
As we develop Ireland’s Migration and Integration Strategy this year, we must honestly answer the questions around the rate of population growth.
What does sustainable look like?
What skills are needed for our country and how does this relate to work permits?
How many student visas are sustainable?
