Lenihan line on migrant labour

LEST some of our Turkish friends think that young Conor Lenihan’s Dáil outburst was racist, it might be useful to point out that Conor’s late father famously made an equally insensitive remark about our own migrant labourers in the 1980s.

As tens of thousands of young Irishmen trudged off every year to work for dodgy builders in England, Brian Lenihan smugly dismissed the problem by asserting that “we couldn’t all live on this small island”.

At that time he had been part of Ireland’s ruling elite for two decades.