Offt
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I see Irish deportations from the US are up 50% on last yearâŚgreat to see illegals getting served justice.
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13 years? Money well invested
Itâs a nice gravy train for rhe consultancies.
Itâs a win for the government too. They donât have to hire thousands of workers and be stuck paying them pensions.
Thousands of workers? 
Do you think these consultants are out doing blue-collar work?
No, they are doing business and technology consulting work.
It would be beyongmd the abilities of the government and civil service to hire and train internal talent to do this work.
You could be overestimating the calibre of consultant that these lads send into government departments. Itâs guaranteed money regardless of performance , why would they send the top dogs ?
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They may not be high calibre but they can be brought in with the specific skills that a department needs at a point in time.
They donât have to be retained indefinitely.
Imagine trying to deal with a team of civil servants hired as Visual Basic developers who are refusing to upskill to anything beyond it.
They are creaming it⌠charging up to 1600 a day for some fellas and paying Rajesh less than 500.
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Yep, but the state wonât be funding a pension for Rajesh when heâs 90.
And if Rajesh turns out to be useless, then the department can ask for Ramesh to replace him.
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Excellent article by OâToole. Of course his facts arenât going to persuade any anti-immigration fantasists who have graduated from the University Of Facebook and refuse to live in the real world.
Simon Harris is deliberately spreading disinformation on immigration
For Fine Gael, the small number awaiting deportation is proof inward migration has become âtoo highâ
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TĂĄnaiste Simon Harris at Custume Barracks in Athlone, where he commented that Irelandâs migration numbers are too high. Photograph: PA
Tue Nov 04 2025 - 06:10â˘5 MIN READ
There is a question that hovers over Irish politics: what will the parties of power do when they start to panic about losing it? Last week, after their joint debacle in the presidential election, we got the grim answer: turn on immigrants.
One of the reasons the far right has been less potent in Ireland is that most mainstream politicians have been responsible in their utterances on immigration. The Government parties have not followed their centrist counterparts in other countries by trying to compete on the terms set by ethnonationalist reactionaries. Until now.
Last week, the TĂĄnaiste Simon Harris said: âOur migration numbers are too high, and I think that is really an issue that needs to be considered in a very serious way by Government. One of the reasons I think they are so high is that there are too many people who come to this country and are told they do not have a right to be here, and it is taking too long for them to leave the country.â
On any ordinary understanding of language, Harris was saying that failed asylum seekers who have not yet been deported make up a very significant proportion of what he considers to be excessive inward migration. And by any ordinary understanding of honest public discourse, this is dangerous nonsense.
It so obviously absurd that I assumed at first that Harris had, as the Americans say, misspoken â he surely just mangled his words. But the following day, his most senior colleague Pascal Donohoe agreed with what Harris had said. And Fine Gael TD Barry Ward said his leaderâs comments had been âmeasured and absolutely factually correct. He has identified the fact that we do have massive pressure on our migration system, thereâs no disputing thatâ.
If migration is too high, non-deportation has damn all to do with it. The connection between the claim and the evidence is utterly spurious
Ward, like Harris, referred to âmigrationâ rather than âasylumâ. Both men could have said â with rational justification â that there is great pressure on the asylum system. They didnât â they said that the problem is with migration. And they did this in a âmeasuredâ (calculated and deliberate) way.
Just over 125,000 people came to Ireland in the 12 months up to April this year. Of these, 31,500 were Irish citizens returning from abroad. Letâs assume that these Irish returnees do not count in Harrisâs âtoo muchâ â so weâre talking about an annual influx of around 94,000 migrants from other countries.
On the other side of this equation, 2,403 deportation orders were signed in 2024. Of these 1,116 people departed the State, mostly voluntarily â so 1,287 people were, in Harrisâs terms, âtold they do not have a right to be hereâ but failed or refused to âleave the countryâ.
Thus, failed asylum seekers who have not yet left the country make up less than two per cent of annual inward migration. To put it another way, if all the failed asylum seekers had been deported, the number of non-Irish immigrants would have fallen from 93,800 to 92,600.
If migration is too high, non-deportation has damn all to do with it. The connection between the claim and the evidence is utterly spurious.
Almost everyone agrees that it is reasonable for the State to help people who have been judged not to have the right to asylum to leave â and to speedily deport those who refuse to do so voluntarily. So the issue here isnât really about deportation or indeed about the asylum system itself. Itâs about the once and future Taoiseach spreading disinformation on immigration. (He might read the Department of the Taoiseachâs own website which warns against disinformation, which it defines as âsomething published or shared to deliberately mislead peopleâ.)
His disinformation is a deliberate confusion of two very different questions. Fine Gael has decided to use the existence of a small number of people awaiting deportation as proof that inward migration as a whole has become âtoo muchâ â a classic far-right reality distortion technique in which a minor and unrepresentative section of foreign-born people is made to represent the whole.
This is a three-card trick. The first card is inward migration â the approximately 94,000 people coming into Ireland. The second card is the number of people who seek asylum in Ireland: 18,560 last year. The third is the small proportion (seven per cent) of those who were refused asylum and were awaiting deportation: 1,287.
The trick is to switch the cards and make the 1,287 stand for the whole 94,000. Why? Because it sends the none too subtle message that the whole 94,000 âdo not have a right to be hereâ.
This is disgraceful duplicity. Simon Harris knows very well that the overwhelming majority of inward migrants have a literal and legal right to be here. More than 25,000 of the 94,000 are EU citizens who have the same right to live and work in Ireland as we have to live and work in their countries. Nearly 5,000 were UK citizens, who likewise have the mutual entitlements we share on these islands.
This leaves around 63,000 people coming in from non-EU and non-UK countries. Some of these people are Ukrainians who have been given refugee status. The vast majority of the rest are here on student visas or work permits. Those in the latter category range from construction workers to hospitality staff to nurses and doctors to specialists brought in by multinational companies.
So how many of these people does Harris believe to be too many?
He could, certainly, send home the 20,000 students from India, the US, China and Canada â thus triggering the financial implosion of most of Irelandâs third-level institutions.
He could outrage the multinationals by telling them they canât bring in those electronic engineers and pharma scientists. He could cause a crisis in the health and social care systems coming into the winter by blocking the importation of more nurses and doctors and care workers.
But of course Fine Gael doesnât want to do any of these things. It just wants to point and shout, âOver there! Donât look at us! Look at them!â
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That seems to be an absolutely cut and dried facts and statistics evisceration of anyone whoâs anti immigration. Is there any argument against what fintan has said there?
Ireland is an island. The 18k that seek asylum here each year are not refugees, they have come from European countries , this makes them economic migrants. Itâs not the 1287 failed applicants thatâs an issue, itâs the full 18k + year on year. On top of free loading Ukrainians of course @Corksfinedtboy âŚ
Weâve had enough. #Irelandisfull. #Noplantations. #Getthemout
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Itâs no surprise that Harris in an attempt to stop the bleeding after the presidential election makes a balls of whatever he was trying to say. The man is an idiot.
82% of the population disagree with government policy on immigration, specifically the IPA shambles. 12% of the electorate supported the government candidate. Itâs hardly surprising panic has set in, and no less surprising the clowns donât acknowledge the whole system is broken.
OâToole conveniently left out the Taoiseachâs remarks that 80% of asylum seekers are economic migrants and not genuine asylum seekers, and are rejected at their first hearing.
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Bravo
100 pc correct,
If youâve a work visa - welcome
If no paperwork- ta ta
All these Ukrainian nazis that started the war with Russia are living here like its 1950s Argentina. There were lads on here who tried to house them⌠these nazis sympathisers need watching.
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80% of the 18000?
He should have included those remarks so, because theyâre false.
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You must be very bored these days
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