This fella is obsessed with opinion polls and seems to form all his opinions entirely on the basis of opinion polls. And cliches, lots of cliches.
Itās almost like heās outsourced his brain functioning to the manufacturing consent mob.
There was a poster like that here before called Labane1917.
Itās surely higherā¦ you have to allow for trafficked persons but given we are an island Iād say 95% have come from other EU countries , making them economic migrants.
So can I tell by overblown sarcastic tone you more or less agree with fintan o toole? The numbers of illegals/refugees seem very small when you break it down. Next break down is how many are children or military aged males
I recall how Fine Gaelers used to go on about welfare fraud as if it was the major issue facing the country as opposed to the reality that it was a very minor, largely irrelevant problem.
Vincent Browne used to regularly make this point and utterly demolish the idea that welfare fraud was any sort of major issue. He correctly pointed out that it was a hobby horse of right wing politicians and right media to get people to ālook over thereā.
The same is very much true now of this framing of asylum seekers as āa problemā. Itās a campaign of demonisation driven by fascist billionairesā money in order to get people to look away from actual issues.
The people who spend their lives whining about asylum seekers have no interest in any sort of complexity and zero interest in having a functioning society. They only want to shout slogans fed to them by fascist South African billionaires and their agents.
They donāt live in the real world.
What does military age males have to do with anything? What age is that? Can females not join the military?
yes
First off, Iām not anti immigration or taking in refugees. We need a degree of the former for the economy and have to take a degree of the other on compassionate grounds.
FFG were very happy to stand back and let hateful bastards erode SFās base. This was calculated. Now that it erodes their base itās an issue and Iām happy to see them called out.
As for the numbers gameā¦ itās complex. We are indeed an island so very few are actually legitimate refugees arriving from war torn countriesā¦ we are not their first port of call and they are here for economic opportunities mostly. And more power to themā¦ but up to last year the majority were coming from countries with no war or crisis. Like Algeria or Georgiaā¦ we finally updated our database and countries like this were off the list but we had years of taking in people who werenāt really refugees and then taking another 7 years to assess them 
. A broken outdated system with the Ukrainian crisis dumped on top of it is largely the issueā¦but we must also recognise that the population has grown sharply over the last 5 or so years. Migrants/ refugees/ returning Irishā¦a lot of systems and ability to take people in are creaking. Is that the fault of people coming here for a better life? Not in the slightest. I agree with mr otooles sentiments , ffg have been playing football with the refugee topic for a lot longer than the recent presidential election. But the issue as a whole is also a lot more complex than arriving at the small number of claimants refused refugee status. Refugees are not the cause of any of them but they sit within them.
Being an island the question is how much of mainland Europeās burden are we willing to take while getting our own shit together.
Thatās an awful lot of effort to write a load of vague, meaningless, clichĆ©-ridden waffle that adds precisely nothing.
Will anybody read this heartfelt post
Oh my word
When you mentioned the transgender I thought it was Izzy Kamikase you meant, that was a shock, this fella looks like the missing Downey brother 
You just know people arenāt serious about this argument when you have some people claiming more migrants and asylum seekers is a capitalist conspiracy and then on the other you have people claiming capitalist want people to he distracted by immigration.