The Weekend Fine Gael Went Full Tory
The Weekend Fine Gael Went Full Tory
Simon Harris Lies By Blaming Immigrants For His Homelessness Failure
In an interview with Hugh O’Connell in The Sunday Times, Taoiseach Simon Harris took Fine Gael into full Tory mode in preparation for the next election.
Like any good neoliberal conservative worth their market dependant salt, he attempted to frame his anti-immigrant posturing as being something the people understand. All too often we’ve heard numerous Tory racist diatribes in the UK start with “the public wants…” from the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Priti Patel, and now we have the Taoiseach aping these questionable role models by saying:
“People understand the fact that homelessness numbers are heavily impacted by the fact we are seeing many people seek protection in our country, seek asylum in our country and many people come from abroad hoping to have a new future in Ireland and immigration, it has many, many pluses, but it has had a challenge there.”
If anyone wants to take a few minutes to find the Department of Housing’s own Homeless Quarterly Progress Report Quarter 2 2024, they will see in the table on page 8 and the graph on page 9, that while people leaving Direct Provision are included in the homeless numbers, people seeking international protection are not included in the homeless numbers.
President Michael D. Higgins has already weighed in by saying he disagrees with Simon Harris and that “Statements must be based on facts”.
So why would the Taoiseach say this, and go so far as to project the same understanding on the voting public? The same reason that Boris Johnson expelled any remaining centrist Tories from the Conservative party in the UK and took his acolytes on the Brexit crusade to deregulate Britain and poach the UKIP voters that were racist, but not too racist.
Boris saw Nigel Farage’s less extreme UKIP voters as easy pickings, and Simon Harris is doing exactly the same thing having seen the increase in support for racist independents in the local and European elections.
The Taoiseach has positioned himself and Fine Gael in the middle of an othering sandwich. On one side we have the more extreme far-right agitators and voters who he can conveniently distance the party from and declare that they don’t even deserve to have their voices heard unless they run for office.
“We’re not going to allow a small number of people to misrepresent our country. If they want to contest the next election, bring it on, but in the absence of that, they don’t have a right to speak for the country.”
While I agree that fascism and racism have no place anywhere, proclaiming that one group or another shouldn’t even have the right to speak sets a dangerous precedent that eventually nullifies any fair criticism from any side. Skewing the Overton window that far beyond facts lead to Suella Braverman being able to shamefully label anti-genocide demonstrations as hate-marches in the UK, while at the same time inciting an actual hate march the next day.
On the other side of Simon’s othering sandwich are desperate people, Gazans among them, seeking international protection from situations that some people in Ireland could not even comprehend the trauma of. By blaming these unfortunate people, he can tap into those Fine Gael conservative voters who somehow believe that the state coffers are a zero-sum game and by meeting our international asylum obligations, money is taken out of their pockets. I suppose we can’t talk about the €14bn national wealth fund or the €13bn Apple money because they use the magic word “ring-fenced”.
This immigrant scapegoating also works well for those voters who believe the neoliberal con that a state that continually defunds public services and refuses to invest in public services and infrastructure, is somehow not to blame for the lack of housing, never-ending GP and health service waiting lists, soaring rents, etc.
From what I can see, Simon Harris is testing the bullshit tolerance of the Irish voters, and this is just the latest in a long line of experiments. When standing in as Minister for Justice, he launched a Trumpian dig at the media for criticising his support for illegal facial recognition in Garda body cameras. When he was Minister for Higher Education, he positioned himself as the savour of the universities and TUs by promising to fund the sector based on the results of the Funding The Future report and reneged come budget time, and let us not forget, he brought down the last government due to a pending vote of no confidence in him as Minister for Health.
Yet despite all this, he steam rolled his competition in the Fine Gael leadership contest and took the prize of Taoiseach, all the while sculpting a PR persona as the young Tik-Tok Taoiseach. This easy-going, bright and breezy, down to earth, hard-working, man of the people facade is still being maintained, with posts on social media about being honoured to be “your Taoiseach” and thanking us for our friendship.
In reality, Simon Harris, Fine Gael, and Fianna Fáil, have sold the housing market to institutional investors and continue to perpetuate a housing crisis, have overseen a staggering rise in homelessness figures and done nothing to solve it, have knowingly evicted people onto the street by lifting the eviction ban in the name of protecting the Mom & Dad landlords used as a distraction shield for the support of vulture funds, have professed their support for the people of Palestine but let bombs that kill Gazan children land in Shannon, and now, this weekend, are openly scapegoating immigrants and in so doing, further emboldening the racists.
No doubt some calculation has been made that following the same path that took the Tories into election obliteration in the UK will allow Fine Gael to remain the dominant party in the next election in Ireland, and this strategy has most likely been bolstered by the latest opinion poll showing a leading 24% popularity for the party.
I can only assume that 24% of the Irish electorate have no problem with anything I have just written, and in which case, I am aghast at them and at Simon Harris this weekend.
Simon Harris meeting Suella Braverman in May 2023. Image: Garda-post.com