Immigration: What's The Plan?

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1:11To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. how you doing there it is time for the podcast hope all is well john and i are having a little bit of an organ recital before we came on air about our various always as always our various ailments what ails us now what bits of our bodies are falling off and not working and listen if you're young you'll get there if you're our age you know exactly what we're talking about anyway it is great to have you it is great to have a big week in ireland it is a by-election week This is not necessarily something that people get animated by, but as you will have seen in the UK there the other week, by-elections can change the dynamic profoundly.

1:59You think they're kind of small things. You think they're local elections. They don't matter. And all of a sudden, you get this massive surge of public either resentment or support or a change in public opinion. So they are things to watch, not least because they are bellwethers about where the society is going. We have them coming up on Friday. Two of them. one of the main issues on the doorsteps seems to be, and not surprisingly for many people, immigration. What is the policy? Where is it taking us? What's it doing to the culture? What's it doing to society? Certain people have economic views, which is, you know, we need immigrants to do X, Y, and Z.

2:32Other people have cultural views, which is, what does Irish culture mean against the background of large-scale immigration? Other people have resource issues. Other people worry about the education system, the health system, the transport system, all that stuff. And the only thing we know about immigration, it's not straightforward. It is complex. So the policy that a country maybe made the most important policy a country in a globalized world can get right is immigration. So we're going to talk about Irish immigration policy today. And we're going to talk about Irish immigration policy with Sinead O'Sullivan, who has launched yet another, what I would describe as missile aimed at the heart of the Irish policymaking fraternity.

3:18And it is a fraternity. It's rarely a sorority. It's a fraternity. And she is on the line and we're going to talk to Sinead about immigration. Sinead, how are you? Lovely to see you. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me again. I feel like, you know, I'm going to be introducing you. welcome to david's podcast exactly well listen stranger things have happened stranger things happened sinead let's talk about immigration you have just written a sub stack you have broken the issues down explain to me what you're like if we take a bird's eye view what is going on with immigration in ireland why has it been so ill conceived ill planned why is it now spilling out into by-elections, elections?

4:06Why is it spawning all sorts of nascent political movements? And why do you think this country seems to have been so cat-handed in its approach to immigration? Yeah, it's kind of extraordinary. I mean, it's probably, we should probably, yeah, start this by saying that very few people tackle the topic of immigration. And it's a really, really hard one to tackle. It's one that's really important to me. And I'll actually just mention this at the beginning. I myself went through an unbelievably complex immigration process in the U.S. And it was so hard that it defined many, many years of my life. And this is, by the way, not an asylum process.

4:51This was, you know, we'll discuss it later, but this was a very middle class kind of high skilled worker process. And it was so, so, so difficult for me that it really, really upended my life for many, many years. So that is the context through which I see immigration. I've experienced policies that are good and bad. And when I look at Ireland, I was really writing from the perspective of having been so lucky to have been going through a high skilled immigration process that I can't even imagine how hard it is to contemplate what it is like to go through something as difficult as asylum. So that is the context from which I personally have thought about immigration.

5:32There are some biases there, so it's probably best to put those out there beginning. Now, I mean, you know, the 35 ,000 feet view on this is very, very simple. As you said, we went from being immigrants to a nation of immigrants in a very short amount of time. And like everything that I've written about recently, there is just a dearth of strategic thinking, policies, procedures, or mechanisms around any of this. And immigration is not a single issue policy. It is not that you can create one policy and every aspect of immigration can be solved, although we haven't written a single policy. It is so complex.

6:11It impacts people that are arriving. It impacts the people that are already in the communities, and it impacts them in many, many ways across all aspects of their life. So the scene is that it's already complex. And then I guess the Irish approach is to just pretend that this complexity exists. Essentially is how we've ended up here. Yeah, so what you've said in your sub-stack, and I think it needs to be really fleshed out, highlighted and articulated, is that immigration is incredibly complex, as you just said, And Ireland doesn't have or has never articulated or defined what our immigration policy is.

6:55And given that it is up there with the most important policies any country can execute, the fact that we have never, ever defined for ourselves or for others, what is the policy? What's the target? Who are we looking for? Why are we doing this? Where are they going to live? So explain to me, you say in your subject, there is a non-existent, existent policy. Explain that. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much what it says in the tent. We don't have a strategy. So if you ask the politicians what Ireland is trying to achieve or where we're trying to go with any of our immigration, you know, I hate to use the term of functioning state, but in this case, Ireland really is non-functional.

7:38Any other functioning country will have a list of, you know, either economic, social, cultural reasons that really backs up. And there are, there are real, real reasons why you would want to engage in, in immigration and bring people into the country. And other countries have a really good idea about what that is and what they're trying to do. We don't have a set of policies and it's very hard to discuss a lack of policy, but what I've done in my piece is look at two different circumstances through which we have brought people into Ireland and said, okay, can we reverse engineer what the policy is from looking at these two different groups of people that we brought in?

8:19One being Ukrainians after Russia invaded Ukraine, and the other being our asylum intake. And yeah, it's pretty hard to do that because as I write in the piece, both of these groups of people are treated so differently. And we seem to have such different reasons for bringing them over that it becomes clear that there is no policy or strategic thinking around any of this. And the fact that we treat them differently has consequences and impacts, and we can discuss that in a minute. But it really gets back to this. I think the crux of this is that Ireland is a rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, far away from mainland Europe.

8:59I should caveat that saying we are one or two hour Ryanair flight away from mainland Europe. So we are not in Schengen. We are not in NATO. We are not in this European common defense framework. And we have many, many workarounds to what would be obligations in Europe to receiving immigrants. And because of where we are located and because of the unique situation in which we have our own borders that we define, we are allowed to take in zero immigrants. And we can do some sort of workaround whereby we pay the European Union instead of taking in these immigrants. And And why is that? Because the EU has realized that it is hard for Ireland to take in immigrants because of our size, because of our location and because of our complex, you know, territorial relationship with the UK and Europe and other places.

9:55This is we're talking about the South Armagh where you were brought up. Yeah, people are always surprised to learn that. But yes, places like South Arma are extremely inconvenient in some ways. And in other ways, they allow us to do things like not, you know, not bring in refugees or asylum seekers. Now, I'm not saying that that is a positive thing that, you know, great, we don't need to bring in these people. But what other countries would use that for is to say, OK, we don't have a mandate. We don't have to bring in immigrants. We can we get to we are in the unique situation where we get to pick and choose the best people.

10:30and that unfortunately requires having an idea of what best means for Ireland and that lends itself to having a strategy and we don't have any of that so what we end up doing is you know we're basically in the situation whereby we can take in zero immigrants but we take in more than any other country and that necessarily wouldn't be a bad thing if we understood why we were doing it and And more importantly, if we had any infrastructure to facilitate the economic and I guess more social integration of these people into Ireland's society and civic life. And so the backdrop for this is that Ireland, before kind of this wave of immigration started, was one of the worst countries in Europe for infrastructure.

11:21We already had a crisis before we took in a single immigrant. we did not have the infrastructure for our current population. We didn't have the schools, the healthcare, the houses, the transport. And that is the backdrop to which Ireland decided, for no stated reason, that we would then go on to bring in the highest number of immigrants in Europe. So let's look at the figures, okay, because what we've articulated is no policy. there is a sort of blamange of moral positions, of ethnocentric positions, of, well, the economy needs this sort of stuff, and people are going to feed into this growing economy, etc.

12:02But there's no sense of what the policy is, which is confusing, both for the locals, and also for the would-be immigrants. But let's look at the figures in the last few years. Because what you're talking is about half a million new people, half a million people? Yeah. It's a lot of people for, again, we're a rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Our population is already quite small compared to other countries that take in half a million people. And that has massive implications in terms of civic and social and cultural life. It has implications for our workforce planning, where people live.

12:43Again, as I said at the beginning, there are just so many facets of what immigration means across planning, building, healthcare, housing, workforce development, our economy. The list is endless. And it's probably worth mentioning that other countries that bring in large numbers of immigrants have entire programs set up such that they understand, And A, what number of immigrants can the system absorb? Canada does a really good job of this. But a lot of European countries do a really good job of this. We really, really, truly are the outlier here. They do things like civic orientation. The immigrant arrives, and in many cases before the immigrant arrives, they have a really good idea about the country that they're going to.

13:32They have taken classes. They have passed exams on the culture, the laws. They understand the system. They already have started learning. or when they arrive, they go to specific language schools that teach in the local language. They have housing set up for them. They also have pathways to know how to move out of asylum, refugee housing into mainstream housing. They understand the country's history. They have done classes and passed tests on the history. They do civic integration diplomas. And if they do not pass these diplomas, they are not allowed to stay. and all of this signals solidarity between the person arriving and the local life that is as we've discussed this before i mean you discuss it endlessly but we have discussed on this podcast before how complex and how um one little thing that changes in an ecosystem which is you know our social cultural fabric in ireland is so delicate that one small thing could change and it has large ripple impacts.

14:30And other countries know this, and they make sure that immigrants that are coming in really truly understand where they're moving to and why they're doing it. And when they arrive, and by the time they move into civic life, they are a full participant in a way that matches what has already been there. And Ireland does not do one single piece of this. now this is the phenomenal thing so you've cited you know Denmark Netherlands these are countries that have an integration policy they have all sorts of both welcoming aspects but also barriers too like if you want to come into the society this is the deal here Ireland has zero of these things I think it comes back to the theme Sinead of your recent subtext which is there is no institutional seriousness about building the capacity to achieve, in this case, immigration, we've spoken about housing, we've spoken about transport, etc.

15:34There is no structural capacity, and there's no urgency to actually create that structural capacity here. So what you've said is we've taken in more immigrants per head than any other EU country, which is phenomenal. Over a three years consecutive period, we've taken more than 100 ,000 immigrants. There are various different types of immigrants, which I want to talk about now, because there's the Ukrainians, there are asylum seekers, there are European community citizens, there are British citizens, and of course, there are the professional workers who are coming here, are workers across the border, the healthcare, etc.

16:19So there's various different strands of immigration, which all comes up to this macro number of 100 ,000 or 500 ,000, etc. But what you've also articulated is an unwillingness to create the structures, number one, because we haven't defined what we're doing, number two, an unwillingness to define what we're doing. God knows why. Are we afraid of offending people? Are we afraid of actually putting it to a vote? Are we afraid of informing our own people? But altogether, you've said that what happens is a sort of a cruelty. It's a two-tier system. And it's a cruel system. Yeah. I, again, I come at this from the lack of institutional capacity does one thing and one thing only.

17:02And it creates a system that is horrifically cruel. I mean, I could have cried writing that post. It is something I have felt so strongly about for so long. Nobody is talking about the cruelty that this government is systematically placing on both types of people, the people coming in and the people that are already there. And it's kind of like a cruel joke. I don't know, they're at Leinster House kind of pretending to be the adults in the room saying, come on, stop being racist. And we're, you know, grow up and we're, you know, it's unbelievable. So yes, it is cruelty and it is ministered through this lack of strategic thinking and a lack of policy.

17:46And it's important to recognize that both of these types of people are suffering and will continue to suffer until, well, I'm not sure where this goes, but in my post, I allude to the fact that it can only get worse from here. So let's talk about the cruelty. So you're talking about the asylum seekers now? Yes. Well, I mean, not just the asylum seekers, even people. I mean, yes, of course, that is where it is most acute. But let's not forget that people, that even the people coming on high-skilled visas, it is a human cost to uproot your life, move your family, to take these huge risks, to come to a country where you know no one, you have no social fabric, you don't know what support you're going to have, even if you have a well-paid job and you cannot find a house, you cannot find a school.

18:40So even the most well-resourced people are going to find this system unbelievably difficult for them, their families. So yes, even at the highest level, this is very difficult. But where I think we should focus our discussion now is on the asylum seekers that are coming in. And it's kind of crazy that we, you know, at the same time that we are going through this, this kind of collective understanding of what we did in mother and baby homes and the cruelty that we administered again at a state level to many, many people. And we have learned nothing from that. This is the version of the mother and baby homes of my generation.

19:25And I came to really understand some of the more social harms that are being done here. When I came across an artist, and I included one of his photographs in a piece called J.P. Keating, and he had photographed life at one of these IPAS centers. And I could cry thinking about it. These are human beings. They have hopes, dreams, ambitions like the rest of us. They have also come from systems that are cruel, which is why they are here in the first place. These are the most vulnerable people that exist in society. And what we are doing to them through a lack of strategic thinking is allowing that cruelty that they are escaping to continue in a different form.

20:08We are continuing. It is business as usual. And we are all responsible for this because we all know that it's happening and nobody is trying to stop it. And you've also made the point that there's a two-tier system. So the Ukrainians are treated in one way and the other asylum seekers. And I want to move off asylum seekers in a second, because there is a lot of confusion about the various different immigrants and what's going on. And I want to go to the macro stuff. But you just have made the point that there's a two tier system between Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians. Yeah, yeah, there is. So and again, this goes back to what is our strategy and what is our policy?

20:46It's very confusing. But if you look again at the two types of people that we welcomed in, it's really bizarre. You know, of course, there was this kind of EU temporary protection directive, which was enacted. And it was the first time that it had been enacted since 2001 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Again, we did not have to take one single Ukrainian refugee. But if you put the moral of this aside, we did. We took in more Ukrainians per capita than any other European country. and not because we have any stated policy or procedure around this or understanding of why we were doing it, but because it morally felt right at the time and everybody was very supportive of this.

21:30But there was no plan for these people. And this in itself is cruel. We welcomed these people to Ireland and we treated them so differently to the people that are asylum seekers. We gave them immediate ability to work. We put them in houses, not in, you know, repurposed hotels dungeons that the asylum seekers live in. We gave them access to healthcare, to schools. We treated them so differently. And then we realized several years later, oh no, there's no housing. There's no healthcare. There's no transport. Oh, what are we going to do about this? And we are now telling them to leave and to go back to the war that is continuing.

22:07And this in itself is a long-term, very long-term cruelty because they have built lives here. Their children speak English and play Gaelic. And yeah, like it's, it's just baffling. Again, the human cost of immigration at any stage of this, and whether you're a high skilled worker or you're a refugee, is the most difficult thing that a person will ever face in their lifetime. And we are, it's like, you know, we're cats playing with mice here. It's fun for a while. And then we're like, oh no, they're still here. We have no plan. Let's throw more money at the situation, pay them to leave. it is baffling at one end but like yeah again cruel is the only word that i that i can use in this situation what what it is also is there is this extraordinary pat ourselves in the back approach that aren't we great we've done this we're a moral country look at ireland look a little ireland we're so moral and we have a history of immigration so our emigration so consequently we in some way believe ourselves to be more empathetic than everybody else and it's a policy based on empathy and what you're saying is that empathy without structure is cruelty yeah because what it leads to is a system or more likely a non-system for serendipity luck chance all these things become much more elementally deterministic of someone's life than the actual strategy itself.

23:38Let us switch then to the local people, the people who are now going to buy elections, who are now thinking, hold on a second, I didn't ask for any of this stuff. I didn't ask for these people to be here. Yeah, it's quite nice, but you know what? This is impacting my life. Explain the complexity, the far side of the equation, which are the recipient, the host people, our people. First of all, the working class and increasingly now the middle class. yeah I mean let's start with the people that were most impacted by the arrival of of immigrants that is a working class and again cruelty is the only word that comes to mind here horrifying cruelty so so what happened when these people arrived and there was no plan well the government kind of said we're going to buy up a few hotels we're going to put them we're going to put them in these dungeons we're going to give them no transportation they're going to be in the middle of nowhere.

24:31They're not going to speak the local language. And we are going to tell the locals to just accept that the delicate fabric of your villages, of your small towns, is going to absorb what the institutional gap will not. And every single person's life is now going to be a game of, as I described in the article, a game of musical chairs. There already were no places in the schools for your children, but now we're going to add more children. And if you dare complain about the lack of resources that existed before. Well, firstly, no one cared about the lack of resources for the working class in Ireland before they had long complained that they did not have infrastructure, health care, housing, all that kind of stuff.

25:12But if you dare complain about it after immigrants have arrived, you are racist. And this is it's such a difficult conversation to have in Ireland. And because of this, it has become that the political class have made it such that you are not allowed to complain. And these are real complaints on a factual structural numbers basis. There were not houses, there were not schools or health care before immigrants arrived. I mean, at every level, even like the local economy, hotels are gone. Tourism is gone. Second, third, fourth, fifth, 100th order impacts on these people's lives from every angle. And And their lives have been changed and they're not allowed to discuss it even.

25:58Now, it is so important to say, of course, that racism did exist. And this was really, really sad to see. This immigration, lack of immigration policy has brought out the worst of all of us in Ireland because we have unnecessarily been pitted against each other. And in the middle of this, racism has come out as a real perspective in not just small communities in Ireland, but in every aspect of the kind of middle, lower and double classes. But it is also important to say that the grievances that a lot of these people have is real and has been structurally ignored by the political class forever.

26:39Sinead, was the whole idea of the immigrants being thrown into IPAS centers in these small towns and villages around the country, the very fact that there was no communication with the locals as to what's happening, why it's happening, how it's going to happen, how it's going to work, et cetera, et cetera. So there was nothing shared with them to kind of bring them on board was the lack of all that basic communication seemed to have compounded the anti-immigrant feeling. You know, the people who weren't naturally racist have kind of come out on the side of the anti-immigrants purely because they feel it's been imposed on them.

27:25That's certainly an angle. I mean, you know, like I kind of look at more structurally in terms of competition for resources, but from what I've heard in the mainstream, one of the issues has been around the consultation in local communities and people said, well, you don't get to choose. You don't get to pick and choose who lives in your local community. But I think, again, that this narrative is being used to mask or to get rid of the fact that I don't think these local communities do want to pick and choose who goes there. I think that they just want to have a say in what is happening to them.

27:59They have not been listened to. They have not been heard. And I think, of course, with the lack of any integration, with the lack of any kind of infrastructure around this, it doesn't matter who or what goes there, it's going to be nearly impossible. It is so hard to understate how delicate the ecosystems of small towns and communities are. One small thing changes and it permanently takes a different shape. And, you know, I don't think even that these small towns and communities would have said, no, not here. But I think they should have been listened to when they said we need different types of resources or we need different types of help.

28:38It is so hard to understate how complex and how much support and systematic and programmatic integration needs to happen. And the government did none of this. And the burden of that institutional gap fell on every single person in all of these communities. And it is very unfair to say that that is just racism when people are saying that they feel that burden every day. And yet there are loads and loads of people listening to the program who say, hold on a second. Yeah, this has been institutionally difficult. This has, there are no structures. The local hotel is gone. And we've spoken about this before, but it's a very good microcosm.

29:21The local hotel employs local people. Those people go out and they spend, they spend in the bars and the restaurants. There's a tourist office. There's somebody transporting those tourists around, all that sort of stuff. But there are still loads and loads of Irish people say, actually, you know what? Better this than what we had 30 years ago, in terms of the society that basically, if you want to be a cosmopolitan, if you want to be a globalized economy, if you want your Twitters and your Facebooks and your massive American multinational, well, you know what? The free movement or a movement of people and a movement of capital are two sides of the same coin.

29:59And they say, well, this is what we've got to deal with. This is the new world. Those people up until recently tended to be quite, I would say, lecturing towards more working class people, number one. But number two, they took a moral position that actually they felt very good about. But number three, now what you're finding is that those middle class people, the liberal people, may well be finding that their kids are emigrating as a result of the resource constraints, number one. And number two, now their own positions are changing because the type of immigrant who's coming over, a type of immigrant is going to be high skilled, is going to be competing with them in the job market, in the rental market, and we're going to see something different in the next couple of years.

30:49And you've outlined that in the piece, Sinead, so explain that to me. Yeah, so I mean, I think, you know, I have been an immigrant for many, many years. I've lived in many different countries and I have experienced that and I have been welcomed into those communities as a, well, a net positive, right? Like I'm skilled and I bring talents and whatever and work and I, you know, I contribute to the economy, etc. Nobody in my experience of being an immigrant has ever been angry about the fact that I am there. But I also have predominantly lived in middle to upper class circles. You know, my God, I was at Harvard.

31:28Like no one at Harvard is going to complain that someone from Ireland is suddenly there. But that's also because at Harvard, everybody had private health care. The schools, you could pay any amount of money to get your kids into. The system was essentially rigged for the middle to upper classes. Like Jared Kushner's dad. How much did Jared Kushner's dad pay for him to get to Harvard? Well, I mean, back to that information. Jared Kushner's dad bought half of Harvard to let him in. And now he's running half of the world. So it actually worked. So, I mean, the incredible return on investment there.

31:59Inflation, I think he actually paid 10 million roughly to get in back then. And word on the street is that it's close to 50 now. But we'll leave the economics of bringing your way into Harvard aside for a minute. Let's go back to the Irish middle class. And what is likely to be coming down the tracks for them? Yeah, you know, in January, I was reading about the EU trades deal that was done with India. and I just could not believe what I was reading. So basically, long story short, is that for many years, the EU has tried to do this massive trade deal with India. Why would they want to do that?

32:33Because the EU has loads of stuff, basically stuff they want to sell to the massive, massive Indian population. Cars, luxury goods, fine wine. You know, the French, the German, the Italians have all of these things that they really, really want to export into India. And for good reason, the growth is slowing in Europe. They've already penetrated the US market. And there are billions of people in India that they want to sell these goods to. Okay. So for many years, I had struggled to do this deal with India because India said, well, what do we get out of this? Yeah, we, you know, we get your fine wine and we get your cars, but we also want to make cars.

33:09And they said, actually, the one thing that we do want is to be able to send Indian people into Europe and to be able to work and live and learn and work, you know, kind of move up the economic development path. and for many years Europe had said no and they had really struggled with this negotiation and then what happened the U.S. trade and tariff wars started and Europe said okay wait we really need to find a new a new economic partner so they said okay we're gonna we're gonna accept a lot of the immigration and the movement of people mobility of people clauses and we're gonna get this deal done.

33:48On the face of it, this is a very sensible thing. A lot of European countries are aging faster than they can cope with. They need healthcare workers, technology, engineers, you know, across all sectors, they just don't have people to pop up the economy. And the problem, though, with this is that, again, with Europe, the deal that was done in Brussels applies to all states kind of similarly. And now all of a sudden you have very highly skilled Indian engineers that want to work in technology in these tech companies. They speak English. They don't, you know, it's harder for them to move to Germany.

34:30It's harder for them to learn French or Spanish. They already speak English. And the ultimate goal, if you're in any way technology or engineering inclined, is to eventually get to the U.S. And so once this trade deal was done, a lot of the Irish politicians were ecstatic and excited and delighted about it. But it occurred to me instantly and was never reported on in the mainstream media that what was the inevitable consequence of this, that we were going to have a huge number of Indians that spoke English and wanted to live in the only English speaking country in Europe, the only country in Europe that is home to all of the tech companies that hires engineers.

35:11And where are these tech companies ultimately based in the U.S.? And at the same time, because of Trump, the U.S. is rolling back on all of its H-1B visas, the kind of high skilled tech visas in the U.S. And so the most natural and obvious place for all of these people to go is Ireland. And OK, so that's a backdrop for this, right? Now, OK, so Ireland can actually say no to these people. But it's not that we're going to have 5 million people from India, high skilled engineers that are going to be arriving next week. Because, of course, we control, as I said before, we are one of the only countries in Europe that is lucky enough to be able to control our own borders.

35:52We have so many ways to do that. We can say you're not going to come here unless your job is, you know, going to pay you some absurdly high salary, which means that we get the best and the most talented. We can say that, you know, we're going to give you maybe a period of time whereby, you know, if you perform really well during that time, only then can you stay. So there are so many different ways that we can create a really, really precision and strategic policy around immigration to get the best and the brightest. yet we have seen time and time again that Ireland has never used a single immigration tool that we have to do any of this and so what is going to happen when a lot of these people from India because of this trade deal start moving to Ireland and taking the jobs of our current middle class in Ireland the professional classes we're going to see exactly what happened with the working class with the middle class and that is severe competition for the very very few resources Now, in an earlier podcast, we discussed that a lot of these people have exited the system already.

36:57They don't rely on public health care. They don't rely on public schools. They already... These are Irish middle class people. Yeah, yeah, sorry, yes. So what's the big deal? They don't care if the government brings in immigrants. And, you know, they largely like immigrants because they're seen as interesting in the new restaurants and the coffee shops. but what's going to happen is that these new immigrants that are going to come in are going to compete for the private resources the private health care the private schools and the middle class are going to experience for the first time what the lower the working classes have said for many years which is that this system does not work and I live in a country whereby my own children cannot get into schools and once you see the middle class experiencing this things are going to get really, really messy?

37:46And, you know, very, very well understood is that revolutions do not start with the working class. They start with the middle classes. And this is going to become politically unmanageable with the people in Leinster House at the minute. Sinead, we talked about Peter Turchin, Peter Turchin's idea of the elite overproduction in the last couple of weeks. It's the idea that, again, where real political instability comes from is from the educated classes, who feel that they have expectations about life, about what life should deliver for them, what the economy should deliver for them, and it doesn't do it.

38:22And if it doesn't do it, they get really angry and they change. But the very last question is, to what extent now is Ireland's entire immigration policy being driven for the interests of those very, very large companies, which have kind of held the country hostage because of, where we started a few weeks ago, the extraordinary largesse that they are providing, the actual cascading of billions and billions of corporate tax, that in a way, Ireland has outsourced all this responsibility, not because we are unable or unwilling to actually form the policy, but we're afraid to form the policy because we think it might upset corporations who are here.

39:02And if they leave, what's going to happen? I mean, I couldn't have put it better than Leo Varadkar, who on a recent podcast made very explicit what has been implicit for many years. And that is exactly what you've said on a recent podcast. he basically said that the indigenous economies and the local businesses are holding Ireland back because of the fact that we are prioritizing and in his perspective need to continue prioritizing multinational growth by multinational corporations growth in Ireland. And there is a trade-off. well we have created a trade-off in that we have started to you know position the fact that if we have indigenous economy here and and you know local workers um that we are going to hamper the ability to bring in exactly what these multinationals need and what is what the multinationals need low cost high skilled workers i mean this is the multinationals dream And we are, I mean, it is becoming increasingly clear that Ireland is a vassal for this multinational dream because we have strategically ambiguous policies around anything and everything such that the multinationals get to pick and choose what Ireland does.

40:20And we are more than happy to enact it. Sinead O'Sullivan, we will leave it there. And at this rate, you'll be on the podcast in about half an hour, the next one. Thanks, David. Bridget, this is wonderful to talk to you. I will talk to you very, very soon. Okay, cheers.

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43:06So, Mac, that's the third time that we've had Sinead on, and each time has been fantastic. But what strikes me on a general note, before we get into what she was saying, is the fact that there seems to be so, so many issues at this stage that they're becoming overwhelming for the government. It's kind of, OK, which ones do we prioritize? Where do we start? You know, all the all that kind of stuff. But immigration in itself is one of those issues that has kind of crept up the priority list. And not just here, but across the way. I mean, you mentioned before about the UK by-elections. Immigration was one of the key issues there.

43:51And as I was asking Sinead about there was the communication, you know, at the very base of it. Because there's no policy, there was no communication with the public. So there was no way of getting the nation on board, as it were. So where do we start with this one? I think you're right. I mean, A, there has to be communication. But I think what Sinead is saying is you can't communicate a housing estate into existence, right? You have to build the thing. You can't communicate a school into existence. You have to build the thing. And what she's saying is if you don't build, if you don't have the institutional capacity, if you don't make the decisions, what you get is drift.

44:30And into drift, you get a vacuum. And into the vacuum, you get new politics. I think that's what she's saying. Yeah, I just mean like in the absence of communication, I don't mean fluffy PR, but in the absence of communication, that void is filled by, you know, the other side. On the other side, but also there's more, this is much more than just PR. Because PR is a massaging a message. It's trying to land a message. It's trying to change or influence public opinion. I think what she's saying is that you cannot influence public opinion when you have an absence of a policy. when you have an absence of a strategy, when you have a self-evident, got the state running away from these, what are in effect hard decisions?

45:13It's hard to say no. It's very easy to say yes in life. It's actually hard to say no. And I think we all, I mean, we start this podcast to say to understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. And it's human nature is what we're talking about when it comes to immigration. Because on the one hand, it is an issue of economic resources and whatever. On the other hand, it's an issue of who am I? Where do I live? What sort of country am I from? Who are these new neighbors? What language do they speak? Am I really into that? Am I not? And it doesn't really matter how many puff pieces we have of, you know, immigrant kids playing GAA.

45:50This seems to be the Irish standard response to all this. Say, let's find ourselves a lad from Nigeria who's a good left center forward, you know? And we put him on the 6-1 news. And that's our immigration policy, right? And that, of course, is beginning to piss people off. That's the point. So we are going into an election, by election, as I said at the top. You know, again, usually not important, John, like this, that, treatle-dum, treatle-dee, but a very good bellwether of where people are at in their heads about the economy and the society. Immigration is going to be a big issue. For what it's worth, John, I think that a country that is globalized in nature will end up being globalized in its demographic structure.

46:37That's the first thing. I do think that there are immigrants, we need immigrants in a variety of jobs. I do also think that there is a great demographic reason to have immigration. But I also absolutely understand those many hundreds of thousands and millions of Irish people who are saying, enough, let's just stop. Let's take a breath. This is not about issues of race. This is about issues of capacity. is there a number that actually makes sense? Is it 20 ,000 people come every year? Is it 30 ,000 people? Or do we do as the Canadians do? Do we stop immigration until we have the capacity? And then we say, okay, now we have the housing capacity, the transport capacity, we've built this extra infrastructure.

47:20Now we can open up the doors again. But until we do that, we can't. That seems to me to be incredibly logical, to actually look at what the country can absorb and then absorb the people. rather than take the people in and then not being able to absorb them. That sounds dangerously like a plan, though. And on that note, John, we will go. We'll talk to you Thursday. Thank you.

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