It will not assuage the “Ireland is a kip” brigade, but among several areas where this country excels is media literacy. Apparently.
We ranked 6th out of 41 countries – just behind Finland, Denmark, Norway, Estonia and Sweden – in the 2023 Media Literacy Index.
Unfortunately, none of this chimes with the new Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) study showing how Irish adults vastly overestimate immigration and underestimate immigrants. For an issue routinely landing in the top three of national concerns in recent years, this is as serious as it gets.
Almost 40 arson attacks since 2018, rioters monstering our capital city, children hospitalised and traumatised, wealthy foreign activists being invited to set up new political parties with mass deportations in their imported ideology.
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The country has a population-wide housing problem. The pressure on services is acute. No one has a monopoly on that view. Where it takes a far-right slant is when the blame is loaded on to immigrants by people who a) consider themselves to be educated and media literate; b) sabotage any effort to introduce fact and nuance; c) use hateful rhetoric, conspiracy theories and misinformation to exploit the fears of those who sincerely believe the country or their part of it is being over-run by strangers.
The ESRI’s achievement is to highlight the extraordinary success of their efforts. Asked to estimate how much recent migration (apart from Ukrainians) was for asylum, respondents guessed 20 per cent. The correct number is half that. They guessed that just two in 10 non-EU migrants come here for work or education.
The figure is closer to 50 per cent. They believed that about half of migrants are in employment. The answer is nearly 8 in 10. They thought that Irish-born people were more likely to be in work than migrants. The figure for Irish-born people is under three-quarters.
They believed that Irish-born people were better educated than migrants. Wrong again. Just over 4 in 10 born here have third level education; the figure for migrants is 6 in 10.
They guessed that 14 per cent of the population was born outside the EU, UK and North America; the true figure is 8 per cent. They thought that 28 per cent of the Irish population were born abroad. The true figure is 22 per cent – and who’s going to tell them that this includes people born in Northern Ireland and those born to Irish emigrants abroad, people like entrepreneur and #spoilthevote leader, Declan Ganley or patriots such as James Connolly, Maud Gonne, Mary MacSwiney and Éamon de Valera?
[ What is all this talk of an Irish Maga?Opens in new window ]
But the most heart-plunging guesses related to social housing, the canker at the heart of the disinformation drive. Respondents believed that an impressive 37 per cent of Irish-born people live in social housing and that an even more impressive 44 per cent of those born outside Ireland also have social housing. The true figures are 9 per cent (for those born in Ireland) and 6 per cent.
The aim of Steve Bannon, former Trump strategist and leading advocate of the “America First” immigration policy – to help Eddie Hobbs set up an Irish national party and anoint an Irish Trump by reaching out to the US diaspora – have been well publicised. At least half a dozen political parties of similar ilk are listed among our 31 registered parties and though Irish voters might be hard put to name them, the Bannon/Hobbs entity no doubt would be entirely different.
Various reports from the IRL Forum chaired by Hobbs last Saturday week were more interesting for the list of attendees than for the content. Apart from Hobbs (who has already tried and failed to sustain a conservative political party), attendees included Declan Ganley in the afterglow of his spoil the vote campaign and trips to Mar-a-Lago; the US ambassador to Ireland, Edward Walsh; Independent Ireland TD Ken O’Flynn; Senator Sharon Keogan; Dublin councillor Malachy Steenson, and barrister Una McGurk.
[ Eddie Hobbs: From consumer advice to conspiracy theoriesOpens in new window ]
When US-born Jana Lunden, said “we need to close the borders – I say this as an immigrant”, the response was enthusiastic applause rather than murmuring and scarlet faces.
While Steenson talked proudly of the “huge success” with the flag project, anyone subjected to the sight of filthy, tattered tricolours on lamp-posts must wonder how these patriots define success or respect for the national flag. As for free speech – a big concern of the forum – Keogan told the gathering she didn’t know where they would be without X.
For clarity, that’s the Musk AI platform currently fighting for world freedom to undress a child or to show the bullet-ridden corpse of a woman and mother of a 6-year-old in a bikini.
The real question here is not whether the coming of an Irish Trump is likely, but why Irish and Irish-American Trump supporters haven’t already died of embarrassment. We may be just days away from a modern Caligula making his horse a senator.
In the meantime, the problem of how to communicate bare, important facts and figures to our proudly media-literate people remains. A hint may lie in the ESRI survey: the one exception to the poor guesswork was Ukraine.
The Institute’s Keire Murphy has a theory that the CSO’s regular, excellent data releases of Ukrainian migration, easily accessible and regularly covered by the media, may have something to do with that. Who’d have thought it?
