Suzanne Harrington: Why people, high on hate, blame desperate people in tents for the housing crisis

Pictured are tents belonging to people seeking international protection which have been set up along the Grand Canal in Dublin, only one day after a different section of the canal was emptied of tents and barricaded to prevent their return. Photograph: Leah Farrell / © RollingNews.ie

The greatest con ever pulled off by the ruling classes is to convince the rest of us that all our problems stem from those worse off than us; that it’s the people on dinghies, not super-yachts, who are to blame.

How else to explain that a handful of desperate people in tents are somehow to blame for the Irish housing crisis? And yet these extreme Ireland-for-the-Irish, Irish-Lives-Matter, Ireland-Is-Full, flag-shaggers are on our streets, convinced of such.

Manipulated by rabble-rousers, high on their own hate. And in our media. In our line of vision.

In the UK, the outgoing government — after 14 years of asset stripping — has made ‘Stop The Boats’ a central policy. 

Not ‘Build More Houses’ or ‘Close The Foodbanks’ or ‘Improve People’s Lives’, but in their final act of performative cruelty, their billionaire leader has chosen to divert massive amounts of taxpayer cash to relocate desperate, traumatised people to Rwanda.

Can’t get affordable housing? Blame Mohammad from Afghanistan, not the fact that the only housing regularly being built is luxury apartments for the rich.

In the US, an orange thug has convinced his followers that everything is the fault of migrants from south of the border with Mexico.

Teeth falling out due to lack of public health provision? Living in your car because there’s no social security safety net? Blame Juan from Guatemala.

And now Ireland seems to be catching the virus. The Irish housing crisis is not down to Ahmed from Syria, or Nataliya from Ukraine, or Ekele from Nigeria.

They didn’t cause the Irish healthcare crisis either. Successive governments did, working within a system designed to perpetually enrich the rich, resources draining upward, defying gravity.

Ask any small business owner, any restaurant that’s been forced to close, anyone who's paying a landlord stratospheric rents. People freezing in tents on cold wet Dublin pavements are not the problem here.

For centuries, Irish people have left Ireland to seek a better life elsewhere. We’ve had all kinds of reasons through the ages — famine, war, poverty, oppression — which are the same drivers that spur people across the planet to migrate. 

For our trouble, we encountered No Blacks No Irish No Dogs. We were at the bottom of the food chain abroad, until we weren’t.

Now it’s all shiny graduates and cultural soft power, and we are welcomed everywhere. We enrich other cultures, just as other cultures enrich us. Culture enriches culture. Nothing is static.

So seeing those Irish flags being waved on city streets telling desperate people that they aren’t welcome, is the most un-Irish thing I have ever seen. Ireland, you are better than this.

Frustration needs not to be directed at the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but at the systems that are grinding down the lives of ordinary people everywhere. Systems that don’t care where we were born, or who we are, or what flag we wave.

By all means protest, but protest the greed of the system. Falling into the comforting, infantile rage of nationalism is how Hitler got in.