What we are talking about here is a €12 billion fund to effectively raise the walls of Fortress Europe. Fortress Europe, with its militarised borders, plans to spend some of that money to pay so-called third countries with dubious human rights records and records of repression of opponents, such as the repression of the Kurds in the case of Turkey, to take some asylum seekers that come to Europe. Fortress Europe is a system that was responsible last year for the death of over 2,000 people. Over 2,000 people died in the Mediterranean. I hope we all remember the picture of the two-year-old boy, Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a beach. People saw in him their own children and thought this was horrific and we could not allow this to happen. Not only is it continuing to happen, but it is getting worse and it is funded by our public money. What we are seeing, in Europe and in this country, is a ramping up of anti-migrant policies and anti-migrant and racist rhetoric, to be clear, not policies that would make the lives of any ordinary person here any better. It is purely performative cruelty. You almost cannot turn on the radio these days without hearing the Government announce some new policy to attack migrants to make their lives harder. We now have embedded journalists on deportation charter flights. There has not been a single deportation flight that the Minister for justice has not tweeted gleefully about. It is disgusting. There is policy after policy to make people's lives harder: cutting the accommodation recognition payment, cutting the accommodation for Ukrainians, leaving asylum seekers on the streets while there were and continue to be empty beds in the system, snatching families for deportation and now making asylum seekers pay up to €1,000 a month for completely inadequate accommodation. What is all this about? John Deasy, in the Business Post at the weekend, gave the game away. People should be aware about this. People should go and read this article. The article, by John Deasy, a former Fine Gael TD, is entitled, "Opposition parties bet on housing backlash, yet voters keep calling their bluff". It states: People certainly don't become indifferent to society's most pressing problems that continue to cause huge pain, but they do become less politically responsive when they've heard the same thing said over and over again. Other issues invariably come to the fore and compete for their attention. The issue of immigration is doing just that. By the time the next election rolls around, housing could find itself on a par with immigration as the big concern in conservative Ireland. If that happens, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will be in a better position to muffle the inevitable accusations of failure on housing and infrastructure. There you have it, in black and white. The Government is implementing cruel policies against migrants because it wants to problematise the issue of immigration. The Government wants people to think that there is a flood of asylum seekers coming into this country when, in reality, the numbers have come down and down. In 2022, asylum seekers and refugees numbered about 80,000. That was halved the next year. It was almost halved the following year. It will be just over 20,000 this year. They are not the cause of the housing crisis. This is a trick that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the establishment parties, assisted by lots of the media, are trying to pull on people. People should not fall for it. The problems remain the same, as they were before. Those responsible remain the same as those that were before, namely, those who profit from these crises and the Government that facilitates.

Sentiment score: -0.10