Oughterard Isn’t Just About Direct Provision
Noel Grealish, Independent TD for Galway West, popped his head up during the meeting about the disputed Oughterard Direct Provision Centre to say why he opposed it:
Now I have worked with one or two Syrian families. These were genuine refugees who were persecuted in their homeland, because they were Christian, by Isis. They were housed around Galway, put in houses, they were accepted by communities.
If you watch the news, and even our Taoiseach said two weeks ago that he would take an extra 200 what-do-you-call migrants from Africa.
These are economic migrants. These are people coming over here from Africa to sponge off the system here in Ireland…
I can guarantee you it is not the persecuted Christians and Syrians that are coming here. It is the economic refugees that is coming in from Africa that are trying to get across the Mediterranean and ended up in Europe and ended in up Ireland and ended up in Oughterard.
We don’t have the schools . . . don’t have the doctors for the families. A big city . . . can absorb 300 refugees, but not a small town like Oughterard.
I will say one thing to everybody in this room here tonight, work together, stick together and we will work with ye. I want politicians here to give the same commitment here tonight that we will work to ensure that this does not happen. It will destroy the fabric of Oughterard. Thank you.
The Irish Times and RTE were MIA so this was captured by @Gearoidmurphy_ on Twitter, who deserves your support, because he will never be forgiven for doing the journalism respectable journalists wanted to leave undone. Anyone reporting on this is piggybacking on the work he did, including me.
Gatekeepers have a variety of ways of putting out a fire like this. The most common is to amplify the most contemptible and stupid thing the offender said in the hope of drowning out everything else. If you google this incident you would assume Grealish made some comment about “African spongers” and left it at that.
What makes the opening of Direct Provision centres such a flashpoint?
Cultural and demographic change happens stealthily and mostly in the private sphere. The mechanics of it are concealed from the view of most people, and only the effects are visible. For someone who feels uncomfortable with change, there is no concrete point to tie their discomfort to. You just get up one morning and realise the change has already happened.
Direct Provision centres provide that concrete point. They are the concept of demographic change given physical form — the government saying we have decided to bring these people from around the world to your community and there’s nothing you can do about it. So protests and comment happen there because there’s no other physical or political space for them to happen.
Resistance to Direct Provision can also be cloaked in the language of local economic concerns — class sizes, Police numbers, public transport, hospital spaces — which have been deemed acceptable to worry about. (There’s no doubt those really are the primary concerns of many people.)
Irish people really want to be hospitable. It’s written in their hearts, truly, and it aches through on every frame of the RTE reports from Oughterard. But they also don’t want this centre in their town, or the change it symbolises. Watching the coverage is to watch people slam up against that contradiction, like a blindfolded person walking into a wall. This covers Noel Grealish as well.
Grealish’s kind of remarks are often called a dog-whistle. What no one says is the reason Noel has to whistle for the dog rather than call it by its name is that the gatekeepers have been successful in controlling the limits of the conversation. What he says is contradictory, evasive, circumscribed and nasty. I actually agree — and I find it infuriating too. But this is on the gatekeepers, who have successfully discouraged anyone thoughtful to publicly voice concerns about demographic change.
The only mainstream politician I’m aware of who even dipped their toe in this water recently was Peadar Tóibín. What he said, about the need to manage change, was so insipid and obvious as to be scarcely worth saying. Alan Shatter, one of Ireland’s most prominent politicians, publicly labelled him a Nazi for doing so. This is the trick — you create an atmosphere where no person concerned with propriety will talk about important issues; and then rule those issues out of bounds because only improper people talk about them. Heads I win, tails you lose — so shut up if you know what’s good for you.
Leo Varadkar has asked Grealish to clarify his remarks. What an opportunity! Imagine if he took the time to do that properly— to say that we are going through a period of unrestrained demographic change in this country, of which DP centres are a small but symbolically important part. People are coming here in larger numbers than they ever have, and the people coming are often more different from Irish people than they ever have been. Irish people are attached to our identity and our history, and we don’t want that to suddenly change or be lost, because it’s part of what gives our lives context and meaning. We never asked for the level change we’re experiencing and no one ever asked us if we consented to it, probably because they knew if they had we wouldn’t have consented. If you want us to take on responsibilities accepting refugees then you can do that as part of a programme of managed cultural change that takes into account that stuff I just mentioned. Until then, put these people somewhere else.
Again, he won’t say that, because we’ve been manoeuvred into a position where that kind of comment on the subject is impossible.
I have a friend who reads the stuff I write about on this subject. He inevitably reads the conclusions I come to — that the mainstream needs to find a way of accommodating critical discussion of change — and says that he doesn’t see how that would solve anything, that these things are too ephemeral and divisive to be discussed productively. He thinks any discussion of that type would just become increasingly nasty. He’s probably right. But what are our choices here? The ideal, maybe, would be a political leadership who didn’t talk about the subject but quietly managed it in line with the desires of the country, i.e. in a restrictionist manner.
We don’t have that and I don’t see that we could have it. Leo (for example) is like high level politicians everywhere, in that his priorities are maintenance of the system, the growth of his career within it, staying on the right side of the media class — and absolute dead last, keeping a lid on the discontent of the electorate. The first three of those priorities require him to push cultural change as hard as he can (which is probably also his personal conviction). The latter means he’s going to not talk about the long term implications of it. There is no chance, at all, zero, that challenge on this topic will come from inside the system, or be uttered in a restrained or sensitive manner from inside it, if things stay as they are.
So the proxy war, in which we talk about Asylum seekers and Direct Provision even though we’re really talking about something else, continues. No end in sight. We should expect more Oughterards, and more Grealishes.
