Fianna Fáil Frauds Attack On Migrant Workers Is An Attack On All Workers

The gangsters and crooks in Fianna Fáil are trying to pull the wool over workers’ eyes and recover their support base by turning on migrant workers. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book and Fianna Fáil have no shame about using divisive rhetoric to trick backward workers into falling in behind a century old party of the rich.

In recent weeks Fianna Fail Minister Jim O’Callaghan has made a big fanfare about introducing new immigration rules. They include increasing the length of time before people can apply for citizenship, changes to family re-unification and new criteria for qualifying for naturalisation. All token measures designed to cause signal a rightward shift by Fianna Fáil, but at the expense of migrant nurses, building workers and others who work alongside us across the country day after day.

They stood a crooked landlord in the Presidential election and ended up with egg on their face - because of their fiasco of a presidential election campaign Fianna Fail have been slumping in the polls and are desperate to claw back support. In the Ireland Thinks poll after the Presidential election the party had slumped to 18%, the lowest since May 2024. After the new immigration announcement the party’s support went back up to 20%. Happy days in Fianna Fáil HQ!

The issue of immigration first became a major debate after the invasion of Ukraine saw tens of thousands flee Ireland, the establishment parties of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael used the issue to regain support and most importantly stay in government after the 2024 general election. Lackey of the criminal billionaire class, Michael Lowry, agreed to prop the establishment up for another Dáil term. Fianna Fáil seized on an opportunity to blame immigration for a housing crisis decades in the making.

The massive anger and frustration felt by those of us who live in working class communities - facing a lack of affordable housing, deteriorating public services and few amenities - is being used by the establishment to continue the very Thatcherite, neoliberal policies that have caused the mess in the first place. It was 40 years ago that the establishment decided to lower the threshold for public housing, stop maintaining the estates and slow down building. It was the legacy of those decades of neglect that has our housing stock so low. Not to mention the hoarding of land and property by rich people - which all serves to drive up rents.

If the parties of the rich can successfully divert all that anger and frustration onto migrant workers and onto asylum seekers they can simply continue to attack us workers without fear of a fightback against them. The mainstream media serve the establishment by continuing to focus on immigration as opposed to the government failures.

And the bitter arguments about immigration in the estates causes division in communities and acts as a barrier to effective mobilisation, it poisons the atmosphere and hamstrings attempts to get people to stand up. All we can do is to continue to fight for our communities while taking on the government’s sly propaganda and outright lies.

There is a deliberate conflation of immigration and of those seeking International Protection. The amount of people coming to Ireland seeking asylum is low in comparison to other kinds of migrants who come here through work permits, student visas or from within the EU. Net migration between April 2024 to April 2025 was 59,700 (a drop of 25% from the year before, mainly due to less Ukrainians arriving here). Almost 60,000 of the 80,000 residence permits issued to migrants from outside the EU were student or employment based, meaning they had already paid for classes or were vouched for by an employer and were coming to work.

Most permits were actually issued to Indian nationals, followed by Brazilian, Chinese and US citizens. Most employment permits (32%) were issued for health and social work activities. These are nurses, doctors and care workers without whom our health service would crumble. Many qualified nurses from the Philippines or Nigeria work as care workers in homes, looking after our sick relatives, until they can re-qualify to work as nurses here in Ireland.

The biggest contribution to immigration numbers was the fact that from February 2022 to the end of 2024 more than 110,000 Ukrainians had arrived in Ireland under the temporary protection scheme. Most of them will go home if peace is secured in Ukraine. Those who stay will do so because they’ve secured employment, have children who are in school and have therefore integrated into our communities.

There is a consistent false narrative being pushed that people who come here seeking asylum are all scammers who want to claim social welfare. But according to the CSO of all new International Protection applicants from 2022, 83% of men and 65% of women had employment activity. Women are less likely to be in employment for the same reasons that Irish women are, that is because of child and caring duties. And the same measures that would liberate Irish families from the burden of over-priced childcare - like free childcare in public creches - would increase those numbers.

This is combined with the close to 20% of the current workforce who are migrant workers. Migrants do not exclusively work in the lowest paid jobs or necessarily compete with Irish workers for those jobs. Many bus drivers are now migrant workers and that work force is powerful and unionised and therefore have relatively high wages.

Many Indian workers are coming to work in tech. Migrants are distributed across the income scale and therefore generate not only huge amounts of tax and PRSI but also a huge chunk of all the goods and services produced in the economy. Take away those goods and services and GDP/GNP collapses. The problem is that the wealth created by all workers is taken by the bosses and shareholders and not under the control of the working class.

A large number of studies from all around the world show that asylum seekers economically contribute far more to their new home country than they take away. Every pair of hands is a pair of hands that can work. The population of Ireland in the stone age was a few thousand individuals who lived by hunting and gathering whatever they could find. As the population increased so did productivity.

That’s why we’ve far more people now than then but only a fool would claim the country was wealthier when it had a mere few thousand residents? We produce more wealth than anyone in the past could have ever imagined. It’s in the hands of the likes of billionaire Denis O’Brien and beef baron Larry Goodman. But they don’t mind if their political puppets can keep everyone distracted and keep the rich puppeteers hidden.

Asylum seekers and migrants are your local bus driver, the care worker who looks after your elderly parents, the childcare worker who takes care of your child, the chef who cooks your takeaway, the barista who makes your coffee and the construction worker who’s building new homes. And it’s these workers that the government has chosen to target with their new immigration policy. Let’s be clear - this is an attack on the working class.

As always there’s one rule for the rich and another for ordinary workers. For example, the increase in income required for family unification is shocking. For someone who has been granted the right to stay in Ireland the only family members that will now be considered are “immediate family” in the nuclear family sense. The increase in the income requirement to over €90,000 means that ordinary workers are excluded from being able to reunite with their families but the rich can come in whenever they want!

Changes in citizenship criteria for those seeking citizenship through naturalisation is another example of one rule for the rich and one for the poor. For those who live and work here they now have to wait for longer before they can apply for citizenship. At the same time US billionaires like John Grayken (owner of vulture fund LoneStar Funds) got his Irish citizenship without ever having lived here or contributed a cent to Irish society.

Quite the opposite, his company owns Start Mortgages which has been fleecing working class Irish families through extortionate mortgage interest rates. They also owned Quintain (the developer) up until recently, and through that he’s made millions from Irish families forced to buy homes for overinflated prices. He said himself that he became an Irish citizen only for “tax reasons”.

Another government proposal is to charge asylum seekers who are working for their state accommodation. Initially the government said this would also include those living in tents. To suggest that anyone should be paying for sleeping in a tent or on a bunkbed in an old factory is outrageous. Particularly when around 3,100 people have been refused accommodation so far in 2025 and are literally being forced to sleep on the streets.

There are 166,000 vacant homes across Ireland. More than enough to clear the 100,000 on housing and HAP lists and accommodate anyone who finds themselves homeless in state accommodation. That would also cut out the obscene profiteering by capitalist parasites who see IPAS as a means to swindle tax payers for millions.

The other lie is that asylum seekers are raking it in. The Direct Provision system in Ireland means that asylum seekers receive only €38.80 per week and €29.80 for a child. The cost of their accommodation, and meals, is already deducted from their welfare payments. For the first 6 months asylum seekers are not allowed to work at all. After that there are still restrictions on the kind of work that they can do. Most accommodation is provided by private operators who make millions. For years successive governments have made promises to end this system of profiteering but nothing has changed. They like enriching their mates.

If we want to talk about scroungers, the biggest ones in Ireland are the rich who use all sorts of schemes to avoid paying their taxes. People like billionaire Denis O’Brien who is a tax resident in Malta. The richest 10% in Ireland own nearly half of all the wealth in the country.

The mainstream media and the establishment have been using immigration as a distraction from the real problems we have whether it’s the lack of public services or wealth inequality. The latest immigration policy is the government engaging in bullshit performative politics that will do nothing to make life better for working class people in Ireland. They’re then echoed by far right chancers who will do anything to stop people talking about capitalism.

This is a strategy as old as time. Karl Marx said about English workers’ that: “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.

He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker…This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes… It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.” Only by uniting all workers against the exploiters and rich can we fight for a different society.

As Marx noted the English workers were weakened by turning on Irish workers. The same is true today. If the Irish bus driver turned on the bus driver who’s originally from Africa the only people who benefit are those who want to drive down workers’ wages and hand the whole bus service over to private profiteers. The immigration debates of the last few years have weakened the working class and empowered the bosses.

We want a revolution by workers, to put our class in the driving seat of the democratically planned economy. In a society run by workers with a planned economy immigration wouldn’t be considered a problem at all. Anyone wanting to come here would be asked when they arrive what skills they have and they’d be matched up with a suitable job immediately, they’d be provided whatever additional training they might need. Our economy would grow but the wealth would be distributed by all and for all. There’d be no derelict homes, no shortage of hospital beds, empowered communities would decide how best to use the vast resources available.

Socialists want every single person to contribute to society, regardless of where they were born. The rich would have a heart attack if the working class said to them: hey, you have to work too just like everyone else! Bosses, landlords, shareholders and investors would have to get real jobs.

A planned economy under the control of workers wouldn’t have a housing or health crisis. Nor would it have a layer of rich people making money on the backs of workers. We need to continue to fight for workers’ unity in the battle against the bosses and their puppets in government. But our goal must be more than to run a rotten system that uses poisonous propaganda to pollute the minds of our class merely to maintain the rich in power.