Ireland's immigration backlash, by the numbers

In the year to April 2023, more than 140,000 people migrated to Ireland, a sixteen-year high. Strip out returning Irish citizens and net inward migration was 77,600, up 50 per cent on the year before. The 2022 census found that one person in five living in Ireland was born somewhere else: more than a million people in a country of 5.1 million, giving Ireland the fourth-largest non-national share of any EU member state.

None of those numbers, on its own, explains why Irish politics has turned. The explanation is what they landed on top of.

Two crises, stacked

Ireland has been in a housing and accommodation crisis since the mid-2010s. Then, from February 2022, the country accepted more than 100,000 Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion, the largest intake per head in Western Europe, despite Ireland being the continent's most westerly state. Each was provided accommodation, healthcare and, until recently, a weekly payment of roughly 200 euros. A further 30,000 asylum seekers from elsewhere are housed by the state, and applications have risen almost 200 per cent in two years, in line with an EU-wide surge that reached 874,000 claims in 2022.

The two crises fed each other. A state that could not house its own people took on responsibility for housing tens of thousands more, spending more than a billion euros on migrant accommodation in the first nine months of 2023, while homelessness reached a record high in the same period. Modular homes went up for new arrivals while the housing lists did not move. It is that stacking, the visible ordering of who gets scarce things first, that turned an abstract policy debate into a felt grievance.

The protests

The first demonstrations, in late 2018, were small and rural, aimed at the placement of direct-provision centres in villages with no consultation. From November 2022 the movement became national, as sites across the country were converted into refugee shelters at speed. Most protests have been peaceful. Some have not: Dublin saw serious rioting in late 2023 after three young children and a care worker were stabbed outside a school, and there have been dozens of arson attacks on buildings earmarked for asylum housing in the year since.

Demonstrators carrying Irish flags have marched in Dublin in the tens of thousands, calling for an end to mass migration and for a government that answers to its own citizens first. The polling suggests they are not a fringe: surveys put the share of Irish people who say immigration is too high at around 75 per cent.

The coverage gap

Those protesters have a specific complaint about how they are covered. RTÉ, the semi-state broadcaster, gave one of the largest anti-immigration marches in the country's recent history six lines of coverage on its website and described it as a large crowd. Newer outlets such as Gript have grown by covering what the established media would rather step around. When mainstream coverage treats a majority position as unmentionable, the majority does not change its mind. It changes its media.

What is striking in the street interviews is not rage but apprehension. People preface their views with the same sentence: we are afraid of being called racists. Then they point at the facilities that cannot cope, the services already stretched, the town that was never asked. That is not hatred of anyone. It is grief at being unheard, and it is the emotional register of this entire movement.

Where it goes

Ireland's free-movement era began with the Nice Treaty in 2003, and for its first decade migration meant Eastern European workers arriving into a booming economy. What has changed is scale, speed and composition, and the state's visible inability to manage any of the three. The government has so far responded with the tools it knows: more emergency accommodation, more spending, and no change of direction.

Across Europe, governments fearing exactly this backlash are reaching for harder tools, from tightened deportation laws to offshore processing. Ireland, which likes to think of itself as the exception to European politics, is discovering that it is not exempt from European arithmetic. Housing that does not exist cannot be allocated twice, and a state that tries will eventually be corrected by its voters.

First published as a video essay on 19 May 2024. The written edition has been lightly edited for the page.