Germany, 10 Years After “Wir Schaffen Das”, What Really Happened? with Katja Hoyer

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1:15How are you doing there? Welcome to the podcast. We're going to get straight into it. This podcast is going to be all about Germany. Why? Because this week is the 10th anniversary of the week that Angela Merkel, in the summer of 2015, late August, said, We schaffen das, which is, we can do this, and opened Germany's doors to many, many refugees. What we're going to look at this week is what happened. what happened in Germany, society, culture, politics, economics over that subsequent 10-year period. And we're going to be guided by the brilliant German historian Katja Hoyer. So let's go straight to Germany and talk to Katja.

2:04Katja, how are you doing? It's good to see you. Yeah, good to see you too. Katja actually just said to me, I said, how are you, Katja? She says, I'm as tired as you look. So that really gives an indication of the state of me this morning Now, listen, I know that you are in a celebratory mood because you have just handed in the manuscript of your new book. Tell me what it is, when it's coming out, and what the story is. It's called Weimar, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, and it's hopefully just as dramatic as that sounds. It'll come out in May next year, 2026, and it's about the town of Weimar between the two world wars.

2:42I think when I talk to people about this, they all say, oh, I didn't even know there was a town called Weimar. I thought it was just the Republic. And that's exactly the point. So the German relaunch, if you want to call it that, after the First World War, the attempt to create a more civilized, more democratic country started in Weimar. And they called it the whole thing, rebranded it basically after the name of Weimar, because it is so central, that town to German culture. It's where most of the national poets lived and worked, you know, sort of lots of composers, Liszt, for instance, lived there for a while, so did Nietzsche, all the great German sort of thinkers and doers spent some time in Weimar over the centuries.

3:23And the idea was to use this name to create a more civilized, more or less military Germany than could have been done in Berlin. But it's also because it's the heart of German culture, a town that the Nazis obsess over and where they also relaunched their campaign when Hitler comes out of prison in 1924. and so it's a really interesting point I follow several people who live in Weimar and sort of are observers but also contributors to these events all the way from socialist resistance fighters to outright Nazis and I follow these people and Nietzsche's sister who makes sure that the leg - Nietzsche's sister?

3:59Yeah and who still lives there and is trying to make sure that the legacy of her brother lives on and the Nazis sort of make her an offer that she can't refuse and the whole Nietzsche's whole idea of superhumans, of the Herrn mention, basically becomes a Nazi idea as well. So it's an interesting mixture of people and I follow them between the two world wars to sort of look through this one town to try and see what happened to Germany in that time. Katja, can I just ask you, where exactly is Weimar? So Weimar is quite a small town and it's almost exactly in the centre of Germany. even if you look at it before and after the First World War when the German territory was still slightly different even then it sort of worked out which is why this metaphor of the heart of Germany is almost a geographical one as well it's slightly off centre kind of halfway between Munich and Hamburg Well the good thing about this is your Irish fans will have a chance to listen to more of this in the flesh because you were coming to Kilkenomics in early November and we were going to be discussing this and loads of other things which is great well listen congratulations I know how much of a pain writing a book is and sitting down and just getting it done and getting it to the copy editor.

5:13It's just such a relief, even though now you have to be as humble to put your ego in a drawer when they come back and say, nah, big red line, big red line. Don't agree. Don't agree. Fact check, fact check, fact check. However, I want to talk to you about an article you wrote this week in the British magazine Unheard. And it's an article that I hadn't thought about, that this week, the final week of August, is the 10th anniversary of the moment when Angela Merkel opened Germany's doors to immigration in 2015. Tell me what happened and how that has changed Germany. Yes, so as you say, it's the 10-year anniversary now.

5:58It's a bit sort of, you know, controversial which date exactly you want to pick since the whole summer of 2015. You know, sort of this moment of the refugee crisis where hundreds of thousands of people arrive in Europe, mostly fueled by the civil war that was going on in Syria, but also that triggered sort of refugee movements from other places as well, Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. So basically, you have hundreds of thousands of people arriving in Europe, obviously on the borders mostly, and that puts enormous pressures on countries like Hungary and Italy and Greece. And they are supposed to, according to the so-called Dublin rules that sort of govern the way that this is supposed to work, they were supposed to take in these refugees, register them, and then they were supposed to get redistributed across Europe.

6:49And as you can imagine, hundreds of thousands of people arriving all at the same time, this process became very, very difficult. And people just didn't stick to it. In particular, Hungary basically just ended up waving people through. They knew perfectly well people didn't want to stay in Hungary. A lot of them went on to wealthier countries, particularly Germany and Austria. And they basically just bused people to the borders and allowed them to walk through. And at that point, Angela Merkel, the then Chancellor of Germany, was faced with a situation where lots of people were arriving at the German borders and she had to make a decision to let them in, even though they were supposed to, according to the rules, get registered elsewhere.

7:28and she decided exactly 10 years ago to suspend that Dublin protocol and just let people in completely unchecked and that was a controversial decision at the time already because for one thing they had no idea if it was actually Syrians arriving or people from elsewhere who'd heard that the borders were open now and secondly there were no security checks so they had no idea if they were letting families from war-torn Syria in or terrorists for example who may have jumped on the bandwagon. So that was already a very sensitive and heated decision at the time. And 10 years on, that debate hasn't got any quieter.

8:06So because I remember that summer in particular, people was mainly coming to Greece, then up via Serbia, Croatia, then the Hungarians either bus people through and then the Hungarians built a massive big wall around Hungary, built a big fence. And I think what Mrs. Merkel said is, we've got this, we can do this. That was the sort of slogan. What did she do? Give me a sense of the numbers, because I want to see what has happened since, what has happened to German political culture, German society, German urban culture, etc. But give me a sense of the numbers relative to the German population, the types of people, were they kids, were they men, were they women, all that sort of stuff.

8:49Yeah, I mean, we use the word unprecedented a lot in politics these days, but in this case, it actually applies. I mean, the numbers were massive, which is part of the controversy at the time as well. So in 2015 alone, we're officially talking about 1.1 million people who entered the country as asylum seekers. And that's just the people who actually registered once they came in. So the actual figures are likely to be higher of people who just came in and didn't register. So that's 1.1 million people, just under half of that, about 40 % of them were Syrians. And so the large majority actually weren't Syrians, but people from, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkan countries and other places as well, because the news, of course, spread very quickly that Germany was taking in refugees.

9:37And there's also the hurdles to get into the welfare system were also pretty low, because the idea was to help people quickly. And so it was quite easy to apply for benefits, for example, as well. So that was quite attractive, of course, if you come from a war-torn country like Afghanistan. 70 % of them were male, which was also a controversial point at the time, given the implications on crime and other things, and also housing, in terms of how to house people by gender, how to keep the refugees themselves safe in the camps and in the places where they were being put up. And then Germany tried to distribute them basically in the country to try and make sure it didn't overwhelm its resources.

10:21So they were basically within Germany. Then there was a key that they applied that meant that people were then sort of geographically distributed. So this was also suddenly affecting areas that had never before seen any significant immigration because it was drawn to the cities largely. If people came in, you know, they'd stay in like Berlin or in the rural region in the far west and people in villages and small towns never really saw many immigrants. Where I grew up in Eastern Germany, we had one child in my school, in the entire school, who wasn't sort of, you know, East German, ethnically and culturally.

10:56And he was the son of Vietnamese guest workers who had sort of come in in the 80s, you know, and sort of didn't... For your socialist brethren, your socialist brethren over in Vietnam. And other than the fact that he obviously looked Vietnamese, you know, he spoke German without an accent and was completely... sort of adapted to the local culture. So we, you know, people just weren't used to it. And then suddenly the same town would now have, you know, sort of an immigrant population of something like 20 % or so because of this recent impact. Well, because they put people locally in sort of either, you know, town halls or gyms or any other facilities that they had, hotels.

11:35Therefore, the populations of people who just come in were often very concentrated in the places where they just happened to have found a place to put them or they put up for refugees or they put up container villages, basically, like temporary housing, which often meant that a village would suddenly have, you know, twice the population because if you have like 250 people in that village before and then suddenly you put a bunch of containers on the village green, you know, so this caused a lot of upheaval as well. And then Angela Merkel was basically trying to tell people with this Wir schaffen das slogan, and we can do this, that this is a temporary thing and people mustn't worry about this, the country can do that.

12:14And because it hasn't stayed a temporary thing, basically, the borders have largely, I mean, obviously, controls came back and things, but largely, the situation didn't change. If you said asylum, when you enter Germany, you would be allowed in. So now you have a population of roughly 3.3 or 3.4 million asylum seekers in Germany still, which is about 4 % of the population, which is huge compared to many other countries. So this has stayed basically a big topic for people to discuss and for politics to be changed and determined by it. So in the beginning, I think it's fair to say there was a certain amount of pride in Germany saying this is the right thing to do, we are going to stand up, we're going to be humane.

12:58Mrs. Merkel was definitely selling that, that the new Germany, almost to come back to the new Weimar-esque Germany is going to be open. It's going to be generous. We have the money. We have the power. We're the richest country in Europe. And we have relied on immigrants since the 1970s in huge parts of the economy. So we can do this. What has happened since then? This is what I think is fascinating, because this is arguably the key political and social issue all over Europe, Whether you're Italian, whether you're French, whether you're Irish, whether you're German, this is the key issue. What has happened since then?

13:38Well, I think the main issue was that it blurred the boundaries between regular immigration and asylum seekers from the beginning. So effectively, when Angela Merkel was referring to the sort of benefits that immigration has had to Germany, she was referring to the guest workers that came to West Germany largely in the sort of 60s, 70s, 80s to rebuild. They were workers from Turkey and Italy largely. I mean, even then, you know, it was a controversial issue as well because they were called guest workers. And the whole point was that they'd come and sort of help Germany rebuild and then leave. And that was never going to happen if you live in a sort of wealthier, stable country that pays you reasonably well.

14:20You're going to want to stay. And that was also already controversial then, but the numbers were much smaller. And of course, people came specifically to work with particular skills and people had hired them. And this time you basically have millions of people arriving, not with the intention to sort of settle and live and work somewhere, but because they're fleeing from somewhere else, either the wars that were going on at the time or the economic conditions. And so, you know, a lot of them were and still are reliant on welfare. So now you're in a situation where literally half 48 percent of benefits claimants in Germany are non-Germans.

14:58And that creates a huge economic imbalance. And people are increasingly, you know, sort of worried about that and arguing why are we all working and paying taxes and then basically supporting people who either can't or won't work, who've come to Germany. So that's a big issue. And the second thing I think was that because they didn't have the time or the resources to security check people, and since then we've had various horrific terrorist attacks committed by people who'd come as refugees either in 2015, 16 or since. And also apart from the terrorist attacks, also knife attacks, People were killed, including children, by people with sort of, you know, psychological, psychiatric issues who, again, you know, obviously weren't screened for these things when they came in.

15:44And that security element is also something that is huge, apart from, you know, the resources and everything else like housing, the health system, education. Integration more widely is, of course, a huge thing with numbers that large. People are very difficult to distribute and, you know, to even learn the language, because if you're in your own community, you're not going to. And so now you have schools in some parts of Germany where 80-90 % of children are from non-German backgrounds and they don't talk to German children. So they don't really learn the language, but also the sort of cultural things, you know, when it comes to relations between men and women, for example, and how women are treated, those kinds of things.

16:23They're very controversial to discuss because people tell you very quickly that you've got stereotypes in your mind. But it is an issue if you look at things like public swimming pools, for example, when, you know, even as difficult as it is to discuss, but if men are coming from a country where women are expected to cover up and behave in a certain way, and then you come to Germany and you see like 13, 14 year old girls in a public, you know, swimming pool with a bikini on, that is obviously a very different cultural situation that people are suddenly expected to behave in a way in that we've grown up with basically in a way.

16:58whilst the other way around you you travel to a country with those cultures and the German foreign ministry will tell you just be aware that wearing a bikini in public is not acceptable when you go to certain countries in the Middle East and the same you know authorities are now telling you not to worry about the same cultural differences when people from those countries come to Germany and I think those debates weren't had in a in an open and honest way because people were too frightened to speak about it. And that's allowed the far right to grow in that sort of cultural uncertainty and in that atmosphere.

17:32Now, this is kind of fascinating because while people don't want to talk about this in public, the interesting thing about politics is you can vote in private. So people made their feelings felt in the ballot box. And explain to me what happened, where the alternative for Deutschland comes from when it starts to kick off. Because I think it's very interesting. You said in public discussions about culture and discussions about fairness and discussions about we're paying taxes and those are tax monies going off. You're not allowed to say that in a sort of a liberal democracy where everybody says, well, if you say that, then it's only a hop, skip and jump to the Weimar Republic and only hop, skip and jump to Hitler, right?

18:14And that's where you get a tax from. But in private, people express their opinion in the polls. Yeah, I mean, that's particular, as you just indicated, a particular issue in Germany, I think, is that Germany has prided itself in the idea of coming back from all these horrors of the 20th century as a new tolerance and an open country. And so, you know, the moment you try and discuss these things, it opens a lot of very sensitive issues that Germany thought it had overcome. And it rather wouldn't want to talk about it than try and dig these things back out. But as you say, in politics, these things are largely private.

18:51You can go into the booth and make your cross wherever you want to on the voting slip. And people found that the existing choice of options didn't cover any skepticism towards this refugee policy. So Angela Merkel was herself the leader of the center-right CDU party, the Christian Democratic Union, which traditionally has been very, very conservative, even by Western standards, I would say, because of this Christian element in it. So in West Germany, society was still, you know, up until reunification, really very traditional and dominated by sort of Christian ideas of how society should work and how families should work and so on.

19:32There was even a massive debate around sort of gay marriage and things like that, that Angela Merkel was involved in. So, you know, people are used to this as a very right wing, centre right option within the democratic spectrum. And suddenly you've got somebody at the helm who's actually herself quite liberal, I would say has got more social democratic instincts rather than being sort of staunchly conservative, and basically is the architect of this refugee policy and is publicly the head of it and the face of it. So what are you going to do if you are opposed to this open borders policy, you now have a centre-right party that is advocating it.

20:12And the other parties sit further to the left. So you get an option of clapping Angela Merkel on the shoulder and saying, well done, I agree with you by voting for her again. Or you go further left and you say, actually, this is still far too restrictive and we need to do even more. So, you know, where is the bulk of people supposed to go, democratically speaking, politically speaking, who, according to all surveys, you know, we're talking about sort of between two thirds and three quarters of the population very swiftly who have got issues with this, not because they're racist, but because they see all of these issues that I just talked about.

20:45And they want a more restrictive course, which is basically what all other countries are doing anyway, apart from Sweden, which has applied a similar kind of liberal policy to what Germany did. They have nowhere to go. And then suddenly the AFD, the alternative for Deutschland, or, you know, this name is not a coincidence either. Basically Merkel always claimed, including on the refugee policy, that her policies are without alternative alternative laws was the word. There is no alternative. Yeah. So the alternative for Germany said, yes, there is an alternative and we are it. And they positioned themselves to the far right on the political spectrum.

21:22Initially, actually in 2013, when they first became a party, They were a libertarian, quite niche party that was opposed to adopting the euro and other economic issues. And they were basically a splintering off from the Liberal Party, which they felt wasn't liberal enough in economic terms. So it was called the Professor's Party to start with because it was a bunch of old West German professors who founded it. And then in 2015, just two years later, they found this now no longer a niche, this topic, this new topic, namely immigration, which nobody else wanted to touch with the barge pole. And they said, you know, we're going to offer an alternative to this.

22:01And that was too radical, far too radical for most Germans, which is why you don't get this bulk of sort of two thirds to three quarters of people that are averse to the policy actually shifting over to the AfD. It's much smaller than that. But enough people worry about it enough to go there. And basically, because there's this vacuum on the right now, because the conservatives have shifted so far to the middle, they have room to grow and expand. And for the first time they enter into parliament, literally at the next general election, which is in 2017, with a double digit, so I think it's 17%.

22:37Angela Merkel always said later when she's asked about this today, do you feel that you're responsible for the rise of the AFD? And she always says, well, they weren't above 20 % when I was still in power, but now they are. But nonetheless, you know, the AFD itself, leading figures within the AFD itself have called this refugee policy a gift to their own party. And it was really the best thing that could have happened to them because there just wasn't, for historical reasons, because Germany is still so sensitive about its own Nazi past. There just wasn't an appetite for a far right party in the way that had already begun in other countries.

23:12That just didn't really exist in Germany because the CDU always absorbed all of that. basically it went quite far to the to the right and was a broad church to try and incorporate these people well i mean i think i think our british listeners will kind of identify you know that the tories for many many years were sufficiently right and flexible to take in all classes of right but that has changed profoundly now because the reform party is in effect the afd in the uk and can i just ask you what is the position now 10 years later how big are the afd What's the feeling? What's the survey data saying about how Germans actually feel about immigration now?

23:52So it's interesting that the actual attitudes towards immigration haven't changed one bit. It's basically depending on how exactly you ask the question, whether you ask people, do you want less immigration or whether you say, was the refugee policy wrong? So there are slight variations there, but it's always stayed between 2015 and now, between two thirds and three quarters of people who say in each and every survey, that they want a stricter migration policy. That's been the case. And that's something that people like me and others have pointed out for a long time is that this creates a huge problem for democracy when you've got a large bulk of people wanting one thing and politicians just saying, no, sorry, you can't have that or we won't even acknowledge that this is a thing.

24:37They always say when they were confronted with these surveys, they'd always say, opinion surveys, they're this one day and they say something else the next day and politicians shouldn't be listening to them. And I think that was an issue. So the AFD has basically only gone one way. It's grown pretty consistently. The only dip that they've had in between was during COVID because they went completely mad on COVID skepticism to the point of conspiracy theories and Bill Gates putting chips in our arms. Anti-vaxxers and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. And that was too radical for the bulk of Germans who were actually on the whole fairly happy with Merkel's quite strict course on lockdowns and things.

25:14So that was the only time where they had a little dip because they moved away from the core area that made them large, which was immigration. They've moved back to that now. And so at the last election, which was earlier this year in February, they got over 20 percent of the vote and are now the largest opposition party. And surveys since have put them about a quarter of the vote, 25 percent, sometimes 26 percent. And in some surveys, they've actually topped the polls. And this is something that's never happened in Germany since the Second World War, that you have a far right party basically topping the polls.

25:47And it's now really worrying politicians because they're finally taking this seriously, which is why the course on immigration and also the public debate on it has changed now. Irish listeners will find this fascinating because, again, Ireland had very little immigration, you know, for a very long, long time. mere emigrants. Then between about 1995 and about 2015, we had a huge amount of Polish workers coming in, Central Europeans in general. But the deal was very much, well, look, you know, these guys are coming to work. So the same sort of idea was that they are contributing to the society. Now the debate has shifted dramatically in Ireland.

26:27And again, what you say is the regular politicians are saying, no, you can't say that. You can't say that. Yet survey after survey are saying that Irish people have shifted on immigration. There is no party or hasn't emerged just yet. But what you're saying, Jeremy, a bit like reform in the UK, these are sort of, these are the movements of our times in effect. Yeah. And I think if most people don't want radical politics, you know, and the mainstream may think that being sceptical about mass immigration is a radical policy. But if you go into a pub or into a sports club or you just speak to people.

27:02A lot of people hold fairly moderate views on this. And they basically say, you know, this is too much in terms of housing and pressures on us and the economy is struggling anyway. And it's not as good or not as optimistic as it was in the early 2000s and late 1990s, you know, where people felt that things were moving forward and there was still a degree of progress optimism. You know, this whole idea that we can basically absorb a lot of issues, including immigration of people who come in and want to work but often in kind of lower paid sectors which was seen as a good thing at the time but even that is an issue now where you know wage compression was one of I would say one of the leading reasons why so many working class people in the UK voted for Brexit which you know even now when you talk to people most of them aren't sort of swivelized lunatics but they kind of just say you know I found it very difficult to find work as a plumber somewhere because I wasn't willing to work in or to live in a flat with 15 other people and be paid according but I need a wage that pays me enough to live a normal life in the UK with my family.

28:03So those issues, I think people express them in fairly moderate terms when you talk to them, but they find the political expression of them is missing somewhere. And then when it's only populists or kind of, you know, more far right parties basically talking to people about these issues, eventually enough people shrug their shoulders and say, fine, then I'll vote for them. And then maybe at least send a message out to politicians to do something or they've already got angry to a point where they don't care anymore how radical these parties are I mean especially in Germany the tactic has been for a long time to just call the AFD Nazis and sort of you know try and impress on people how radical they are and that you can't vote for them but that doesn't make the actual issue why people vote for them go away and this is I think always been an issue that politicians haven't really understood you know they say oh but they're nazis you can't vote for them and they say well you know at least you now talk about this topic because this has become such a large political threat to you that you feel you can't ignore it any longer and that's also how many people think when especially in germany afd voters when i say to them in the east where i come from you know my the region where i was born is over 40 percent of people now vote for the afd you know you walk around and every other person is an afd voter and you say to them is that not a bit extreme for you and they just say do you know what we've stopped caring really they can call the Nazis as often as they want we need something to change and we've given them 10 years and nothing has changed so what do you want us to do you know and that's how where we ended up basically in the situation.

29:36There's one thing I've always really admired in your work Katcha is the way in which you go in you sit you say you sit in pubs and you do sit in pubs you do sit you chat to people you go to village squares. Don't give it away. I'm trying to keep this a secret. It's a great way because by the way, Katja's blog is just brilliant. It's industrious. It's stackhanovite in its output, right? But also it's like, you know, it's to a degree what we try to do. It's what I call walking around economics. And you walk around and you chat and you sit in a bar and you have a chat. And what you've done, particularly the series you did last year about the East, where you basically went around and chatted to people, was that you were getting this grassroots idea.

30:17And now this grassroots idea is translated into a political movement. And that political movement is unifying people across a whole swathe of Germany. I know it's much more popular in the East, but the AFD are popular everywhere in Germany. Do you think that they will be in government next time? Or do you think the Christian Democrats will shift to the right and what you'll find is that the close of the AFD will be robbed by more centrist parties in order to keep them out? Well, I think, and I just maybe need to explain this briefly to listeners, but it's different, the system compared to say the UK or the US, it's not as easy for a single party or a single person to come into power.

31:03They have to always have coalition governments. And so at the moment, all the other parties say they won't work with the AFD. But you end up in a situation, Austria has been a case study in this really, where the largest political party is now, the far right, and they're not in government because the other parties are all trying to form a coalition against them. But of course, you end up with that being a very unsatisfying situation. They squabble with each other. And the far right is sitting there saying, well, you know, people voted for the things that we are offering. So now you're still trying to do different politics.

31:35It just goes one way effectively. You end up with the party growing further and further. So I think most likely scenario is not necessarily that they will be outright in power, but it may be that they get what they want and split the political spectrum so far that it becomes difficult for all the other parties to work together. The current coalition wouldn't have a majority right now if there were elections again. And so they'd have to really come up with something over the next three years to pull that back from the brink. And just on immigration, where is policy going now in Germany? What is the situation right now?

32:11So they have understood that this is an issue and that they need to do something about it. And so basically they suspended the current asylum policy to a degree. So, for example, you were able to bring your family over once you're in Germany, which is why people were unhappy with it. That's now been suspended. Border controls have been reinstated. So even if you now say asylum, if police stop you, you will be pushed back. That's created some tension with the countries around Germany who are incidentally doing the same thing. So I always think it's a bit hypocritical for a country like Poland or France to complain about this when they actually suspended asylum, both of them, a long time earlier than Germany has.

32:50and then I think long term they're trying to basically find a solution as a block for the whole of the EU to find some sort of way to shift this debate to the outside borders so that the tension within the EU isn't as you know heated as it is right now so that's the long term and they have got a majority within the EU to do that as well most of the other EU countries particularly countries like Denmark which are very very strict immigration policy Sweden's turned theirs around completely from 2015. They were boasting, I think, last year. It was that they now have fewer people coming in than leave.

33:25And that's something, you know, Sweden was the other country, basically, that had the complete open policy, as Germany did in 2015. And they've realized politically it's just not tangible anymore. Katja, listen, this is fascinating. Again, it's the 10th anniversary of the month when Angela Merkel opened German doors. and the society has, from what you said, has shifted completely and changed. It's an unrecognizable society from what it was, let's say, 25 years ago. Well, I mean, I left Germany before 2015, a few years earlier than that, and I find it quite stark going back now, and especially, as I say, in rural areas where you're just not used to seeing people that aren't sort of from there.

34:07And it tends to sort of almost what Germans tend to call a parallel sort of society, basically. they exist side by side. And it's a very odd thing for me to see, you know, having moved away and in your head, I mean, other people who live in foreign countries will know this. You come back to your own country that you once grew up in and it's changed. But in Germany's case, it's quite, you know, a strong change, different change, certainly in terms of the way that certain rural areas have been transformed because of this. Hatch it. We will see you at Kilkenomics, which is, we're going to be announcing in a couple of weeks time.

34:39So keep your ears after that one, but I can't wait. We can talk about this and other things. Brilliant to see you and congratulations on the book. Thank you. It's great to be back.

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37:27Yeah, this is an issue that we've spoken about. over the years on the podcast here. And it just strikes me, I think, you know, attitudes are changing because it is this kind of conflict always between principles, what is good and right and what people should do versus pragmatism. What is practical? What can we do? How can we house people, educate people, look after people. You know, it's this conflict that's not just in Germany. It's Ireland. It's the UK. It's everywhere. It's everywhere in Europe. I mean, I think you're right. I think it's a head versus heart idea. Your heart says, look, we went the way we were immigrants.

38:14These are poor people. They are refugees. They need our help. So your heart is saying, yeah, you know, let's help as many people as we can. But your head is then saying, hold on a second. where are we going to put these people? What about the housing market? What about our own people who are being displaced? What about our own people who feel threatened? And you've just got to make a call. As we said a couple of weeks ago in the podcast, there probably has to be a number. It has to come down to that. In Ireland, is it 20 ,000 immigrants? It's certainly not 140 ,000 that came last year. That's too many for the housing market in particular.

38:49But is it an EU-wide policy that's required? and how do you even do that? I'll tell you, I'll tell you, right? You remember she said the Dublin Accord? Yeah. The Dublin Accord was a real Charlie Hockey stroke, right? The Dublin Accord was signed in Dublin in June of 1990, which was the only European summit to ever take a break to watch a soccer match, okay? Because Ireland played Romania in the quarterfinals of Italian 19th. Oh, the famous match. Yes. and Charlie Hohy, who was the Taoiseach at the time, suspended the EU summit to watch the game, right? And then at the end, at the end, flew to Rome to be in the stadium.

39:37So they brought forward the EU summit for a day because Hohy wanted to watch the game and go, but he was such a clever fox, right? He came up with the idea that immigrants should be registered in the country in which they first land. because he calculated that they'll never come to Ireland first. He was a really clever, clever operator. So that's what Germany suspended, and that's what Germany has now reintroduced. But again, the issue of immigration, John, it's not going away, and it's something that everybody has to deal with. We'll talk to you next time.

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