Anti-immigrant councillor needs to get his facts right on housing issue

FIANNA FÁIL councillor Kevin Sheahan is not a racist — some of his best friends are foreign nationals. He’s had a few over to dinner.

He just doesn’t want to allow more of them into the country.

The latest addition to the ‘I’m not a racist, but’ brigade, Mr Sheahan, a Limerick county councillor, says foreign nationals get preferential treatment when they apply for social housing, while Irish citizens are unable to secure a place on lengthy waiting lists.

Impressionable housing officers are so beguiled by their exotic accents and mysterious backgrounds that they eschew the pernickety rules that apply to the rest of us and hand these blow-ins the keys to whatever lavish social housing their hearts desire.

Mr Sheahan uncovered this iniquitous practice a few weeks ago, when a constituent was told to “go home to mammy” when she applied for social housing after losing her job of three years.

On the basis of this one complaint, an appalled Mr Sheahan realised that Johnny Foreigners have usurped the country’s social housing.

Formerly, the charge against foreign nationals was that they took our jobs, but that ship has sailed.

Now, these greedy ne’er-do-wells are after our council houses.

Other, lesser politicians would have paused before lambasting migrants on waiting lists, and tried to find a scrap of evidence to back up their incendiary assertions before going public.

Not Mr Sheahan.

Who needs pesky facts and figures when you have a gut feeling, and conviction, on your side?

Addressing a meeting of LimerickCounty Council last week, Mr Sheahan demanded that the Department of the Environment enact an “Irish first” policy when allocating social housing, and said it was “an absolute disgrace” that Irish citizens were being “treated differently” to foreign nationals.

“I am anything but a racist. I have had people of every colour, hue, and religion staying in my home and sitting at my table. But I am a pragmatic, realistic person. There’s an angry public out there, and I will always defend, and stand by, my public. The migrant coming off the plane or the ship can’t be sent home to mammy, because mammy’s in another country. So they must be getting preferential treatment,” he said, when questioned by the Limerick Leader newspaper.

Ever since Oedipus married his, mothers have been blamed, but Mr Sheahan’s “mammy” thesis is the first time I’ve heard them used as scapegoats for social housing shortfalls.

Taking his novel theory on the road, the proselytising politician appeared on TV3’s Midweek programme last Wednesday to repeat his mammy mantra to a national audience.

“I would be the last person in County Limerick who could be called a racist… [but] we cannot take any more of them. We cannot afford them,” he said, before bluntly saying that he “doesn’t care” what party leader Micheál Martin has to say.

Mr Sheahan’s acknowledgement that he was unaware of any foreign national who was given social housing as soon as they “breezed into the country” didn’t dent his self-confidence.

“Within weeks of arriving, they’re [migrants] not sleeping in the streets, our people are living in the streets,” he said. This contention is at odds with a Focus Ireland report, published last year, which found an alarming number of migrants sleeping rough in Dublin.

It concluded that many migrants who lose their jobs “have no source of income or social welfare supports” and are among “the most vulnerable and marginalised people in our society”.

Someone should tell them to go to Limerick, where they’ll apparently be handed the keys to a semi-d, with no questions asked.

Mr Sheahan was too busy excoriating Limerick County Council to check its social housing guidelines, but if he had, he would have learned that all applicants have to be habitually resident in the State for five years before they can be considered.

Migrants also have to demonstrate a separate “right to reside” test, introduced in 2009, before their names are added to the list.

If he had taken five minutes to check the Central Statistics Office’s analysis of census 2011 information, Mr Sheahan would also have learned that there are 16,275 local authority homes in the country being rented by foreign nationals — the vast majority of whom are from the EU.

This compares with the 112,758 local authority homes that are being rented by Irish citizens.

While Irish citizens comprise the vast majority of local authority tenants, there is much greater parity in the private sector.

Of the 258,344 private rental units in urban areas in 2011, 138,204 (53%) were headed by an Irish national, while the remaining 120,140 (47%) were rented by foreign nationals.

Meanwhile, foreign nationals also occupied 30% of the 47,033 private rental homes in rural areas. One assumes that these landlords, at least, are grateful that these migrants have not gone home to mammy and are, instead, paying down the mortgages of their negative-equity properties.

An examination of social housing waiting lists, published by the Department of the Environment in March 2011, also underscores the paucity of Mr Sheahan’s anti-immigrant diatribe.

IN Co Limerick, Mr Sheahan’s home, there are 1,298 Irish citizens on the waiting list, compared to just 236 EU citizens and 88 non-EU citizens.

In Limerick City Council’s area, there are 2,158 Irish citizens on its social housing waiting list, compared to 250 EU citizens and 261 non-EU citizens.

This pattern is repeated across the country. Of the 98,318 people who languished on the social housing waiting list in 2011, 71% comprised Irish citizens, while 20% were EU citizens, and 9% were non-EU nationals.

In short, there isn’t an iota of evidence to support Mr Sheahan’s hysterical assertion that foreign nationals receive preferential treatment.

Peddling this myth is more palatable than the truth — that Fianna Fáil, as the main architect of the worst property crash in history, wiping €257bn off the value of homes in just six years, is to blame.

Mr Sheahan won’t be in a rush to tell his constituents, but social housing waiting lists rose by 70% between 2008 and 2011.

As well as underscoring the scale of the unemployment crisis here, this enormous increase also points to historic under-provision of social housing by successive Fianna Fáil-led governments during years when the country was, in the words of Mary Harney, awash with cash.

Reactionary, racist rhetoric, which reinforces prejudices instead of challenging them, is the last refuge of the political scoundrel.

If Limerick voters, at the next local election, are looking for someone to blame for housing shortages, they could do worse than point the finger at Mr Sheahan and the ruinous economic policies his party espoused.