In the summer of 2016, while I was representing Sydney in the Rose of Tralee, the Roses were being shown around the eponymous town when a chatty local stopped to point out the local international resource centre.
“See, we welcome refugees here – not send them off to prison islands like you lot,” he said, looking straight at me, before striding away with a cheeky sense of pride.
Back then, Australia was making the headlines globally, having spent nearly Au$10 billion (€6 billion at today’s rate) in four years on asylum seeker policies, with the bulk going on detention centres, including controversial offshore facilities. The facilities on Nauru and Manus Island were either important deterrents to the deadly people-smuggling industry, or theatres of human rights abuse funded by the Australian government, depending on who you spoke to.
I had nowhere to hide that day from that man’s comments in Tralee, standing there with my mouth open wearing a silly fascinator and a big white “Sydney” sash across my chest. It made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now. I may not have had enough pulling power to decide what dress I was allowed to wear on TV, never mind a say in Australia’s asylum seeker policies, but he had me. I didn’t feel great about the way my country had made the immigration issue into a political football, turning the fates of desperate people into a reason to elect one person over another.
In Ireland at that time, the consensus seemed to be that asylum seekers were not people to fear, just people to help – something that seemed completely alien to me, a young Australian who had grown up with politicians trying to put the frighteners up the general public by warning that our country was being “swamped by Asians”.
Immigration and multiculturalism fuelled culture wars and elections in Australia for the majority of my adult life, but it seemed like Irish ears didn’t respond to the same dog whistles. Big-chested declarations about being taken over or about rising terrorism threats were met with gentle eye-rolls. There was no buy-in to the argument that the local Tidy Towns banner wishing residents “Happy Holidays” instead of “Happy Christmas” was a threat to western democracy as we know it. Ireland was much too smart to fall for all that nonsense our British neighbours seemed to love.
But now, we have arson attacks on accommodation marked for asylum seekers, or rumoured to be for asylum seekers. When one of the primary objections to letting more people into this country is a housing shortage, for some reason the perpetrators thought it better to burn buildings down completely on the off-chance they might accommodate anyone who wasn’t Irish. Valid concerns about how already-limited resources in towns would cope with the arrival of asylum seeker accommodation centres have morphed into marches under “Ireland is Full” banners.
My family were from overcrowded social housing in inner-city Dublin. They joke that Ireland at the time made them ‘economic refugees’
“Economic migrants” and “unvetted” have become the new buzzwords justifying what might be a bit of old-fashioned xenophobia. I am an economic migrant, who did not undergo much vetting when I moved to Ireland following the Rose of Tralee. No one consulted local residents about how they felt about having an Australian who complained about the cold all the time.
My mother and her parents were also economic migrants when they moved to Australia from Ireland. They were given government housing, airfares, vouchers and assistance to settle in Sydney, countering the common argument that Irish emigrants are different from the immigrants that come here because “they always had to pay their own way”.
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My family were from overcrowded social housing in inner-city Dublin. They joke that Ireland at the time made them “economic refugees”. Denied an education and without the social network to get work, like a lot of Irish people past and present, they felt emigration was their best hope of a better life. They were right. The first generation of Australian-born children – including me – have had access to a much easier life, built on the sacrifices they made and heartache they endured, having to give up everything they had to make it happen.
Sustained immigration that has defined and supported Australia’s economy in the past century has contributed in part to the housing crisis in Sydney. But so have government policy failures such as tax breaks for landlords, according to experts.
Immigration has been earmarked as the next key Irish election issue, so it’s important now more than ever to ask: is Ireland really full, or have successive governments failed to give their citizens enough?
It’s easier to be tough on immigration than it is to solve housing and health crises.
