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Notes -
Ireland
Riot police have been called out to the small town of Newtownmountkennedy (population 2,800) in response to another protest outside a site which is soon to become an asylum centre. It got violent and the riot police charged the protesters after they set fire to a building on the outer portion of the site. It seems like most of the protesters/rioters have been pushed into an adjacent field, but police are still moving through the town and running into more angry locals.
Ballina had a ]far larger peaceful protest](https://x.com/Mick_O_Keeffe/status/1781727303283692017) a few days ago, it would be harder to shut this one down given how big the town is (c. 10,000) and how isolated it is.
It’s interesting. The thing that seems to be driving popular outrage against mass immigration in Ireland and Canada is that the government does it with a smile on its face, calls those who oppose it bigots, winks at them, then dares them to blink. Kind of like being patronized by an annoying teacher.
By contrast, politicians in Britain, America and Australia, which have the same migration situation but less monolithically progressive politics and media, will publicly say more should be done to control illegal immigration, stop the boats, it’s not right, it’s a crisis, propose some measures blah blah (I mean even Biden does this to some extent) but then actually do nothing. And in a way, that seems to stifle some of the dissent.
There has been some of this thing (rioting against migrant camps) in Britain, but proportionally it has been much, much rarer than in Ireland. And in Canada one senses even normal centrists are getting increasingly angry about their own situation. I wonder if the Irish politicians will clock on and embrace the Tory policy of talking the talk on migration and then just not doing anything about it (or indeed increasing it further).
Right, there is no 'respectable conservative' establishment to funnel the energy of Irish right wingers through, the two wings of these protests are the more moderate 'We don't want them here (in this particular village)' accompanied by some complaints about how a big increase in population will strain GPs, policing, harm tourism etc, and 'We don't want them here, deport them'. The most respectable opposition you'll get are instances like this fairly satisfying grilling of the Minister for Justice.
Fine Gael are supposed to be the closest thing we have to the Tories, but as long as they continue to call people bigots this is just what leftists say not what right wingers think.
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This seems to work across the west, across different topics. Here in Germany we regularly have even greens occasionally admitting the struggles to get the latest immigration waves integrated, that our social system is buckling and that we need to do something. But any policy that has any chance of actually reducing immigration levels is stridently opposed, the "hardest" option on the table seems to be to crack down on crime but that doesn't actually solve the large numbers of social benefits recipients, where the only solution seems to be "support them more, hopefully they'll get a job this time". In science, people are willing to admit that standards in the soft sciences are low and that something needs to be done, but actually firing anybody is apparently impossible (and admitting that they're very biased as well and take advantage of the low standards to advance their own political agenda is usually denied strongly as well).
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