I is for Immigration

How Ireland's lack of immigration strategy has produced cruelty in every direction

Untitled by Anas Albraehe, Syrian

In my last piece, I introduced the concept of the Failure Premium: the grotesquely high cost incurred when a state outsources its own responsibilities because it never made the upfront investment in building the institutions to deliver them.

(By the way, the signup to meet in person next week is here, as many of you keep asking me for the link!).

Today I want to look at immigration, because it is the area where the Failure Premium becomes most visible, most measurable, and most consequential.

This is because every other Failure Premium in Ireland accumulated so slowly that people adapted, emigrated, or bought their way out privately. The housing crisis didn’t arrive in a single year, which has impacted how we deal with it (à la frog boiling in water). But immigration isn’t like these other crises; instead, it arrived at scale and speed, into the same institutional vacuum that had been already failing everyone else for decades. It is the most visible and most undeniable demonstration of what happens when a state that builds nothing meets a demand it cannot defer, delay, or disguise. Yes, you can hide a housing crisis behind HAP payments and Help to Buy schemes, but no, you cannot hide 33,000 people in hotel rooms.

First, a short personal word. Immigration is a difficult topic to discuss, and as such most people have shied away from having this difficult discussion. I don’t want to do that, because it is vital we talk about immigration. But I recognize that there are people who will, regardless of what I write, willingly and happily misinterpret my meaning and intentions. Where ambiguity arises in this post (as it nearly certainly will when discussing something as complex as immigration), I would ask that the interpretation you lean to is the one where my meaning is of compassion and care. This was not written for any one group at the expense of another. The human cost of failed immigration policy is never abstract. Everywhere in the world where a government has gotten this wrong, the result has been human catastrophe, for the people who move and for the people who receive them. Ireland is no exception.

Therefore, I want to be clear about what this essay is doing. It is attempting to show that the Irish government’s approach to immigration produced cruelty, systematically, in every direction simultaneously, to immigrants and to locals, to Ukrainians and to Nigerians, and to working classes and indeed soon to middle classes. Further, that the cruelty was entirely predictable, entirely preventable, and produced by the same institutional absence that defines every other area of Irish public failure: health, transport, housing and more.

Immigration policy is one of the most consequential any state can get right, because the stakes are searingly high on both sides: for the people arriving, it determines whether they build a life worth living or are warehoused and discarded; and for the communities receiving them, it determines whether community growth is experienced as enrichment or as competition for survival.

Sadly, Ireland got it catastrophically wrong, in every direction, for everyone.

N is for Non-Existent Strategies

It seems like a good idea to start with a basic question that almost nobody in Irish public life can answer clearly: what, exactly, is the stated immigration policy of the Irish state?

As we all know, Ireland is an island that is outside of the Schengen Zone. What is less well known is that, for this reason, it also has opt-outs from EU asylum directives that most member states do not have. Additionally, it is not in NATO and not in the EU common defence framework, meaning that it has more sovereign control over who enters the country than almost any state in Europe, which is exactly the kind of envious situation that most countries would regard as a strategic asset. And yet, Ireland chose systematically and deliberately, not to use this strategic asset.

The stated policy, to the extent one even exists, is that Ireland is an open economy that needs workers because its population is ageing, and that we just don’t have enough local workers to fulfil the basics of staffing a health system, a construction sector, a care economy, and the numerous tech companies that throw us their corporation tax revenue.

I want to be explicit and clear here. The economic case for immigration is very real and it remains real! Also that immigration has been, and continues to be, a net positive for every country that manages it through institutional architecture designed for the purpose! (While this is economically true, I also say this as someone who spent most of their working-life thus far trying to be a positive-impact immigrant in various countries).

And yet, despite the endless positivity that can come from a well-designed immigration policy, what happened in practice in Ireland is something for which no policy document existed or no institutional framework was ever built. I mean, there was no plan that failed, simply because there was no plan at all.

Let’s go back slightly.

Before the immigration surge happened, Ireland was already deep in a housing crisis, a healthcare crisis, and an infrastructure crisis that was entirely of its own making. The country had among the lowest housing stock per capita of any wealthy nation in Europe; a social housing rate in the single digits while the Netherlands was at 33%, and rents that had risen 98% in a decade, the steepest increase in the entire EU. It had 43% fewer hospital beds than the EU average. Over 75% of GP practices had closed their lists to new patients. There was no public transport outside Dublin worthy of being called as such, and the housing waiting list was measured in years, not months.

The institutional infrastructure of the state had been built for a population of 3.6 million in the 1990s and had never been meaningfully expanded since, even as the population grew to five million.

So this was the baseline. This was the country that already couldn’t house its nurses, staff its hospitals, process a planning application, or build a metro line. And into this, without any capacity assessment, or integration strategy, or community engagement, and without adjusting a single service to accommodate what was coming, the government opened the door to the largest per capita immigration intake in the European Union:

• Ireland added over half a million people through immigration in the space of a few years

• It had three consecutive years of over 100,000 arrivals, a per capita intake three times the EU average; the highest rate of any large EU member state.

• By 2024, 23% of the population was foreign-born and 75% of all population growth was accounted for by immigration alone.

This is not an argument against those people coming, and I’ll keep repeating this as often as I have to. Many of them were fleeing war and persecution, and many others were filling genuine labour shortages in healthcare, construction, and technology. There was a smorgasbord of viable reasons as to why people came to Ireland, and the economic case for immigration remains real.

But… This same economic case for immigration assumes that the receiving country has the institutional capacity to absorb the people who arrive, and that there are houses for them to live in, GPs for them to register with, schools for their children, transport to get them to work, and an integration pathway that converts a person arrival in Ireland for the first time, into a participant in democratic and civic life.

This is worth pausing on, because the absence of institutional architecture in Ireland to correspond with even a single immigrant arriving is so total that it can be hard to grasp unless you understand what the basic setup looks like in countries that take immigration (or any form of governing) seriously!

The Netherlands runs its entire reception operation through a single dedicated agency (COA) which manages state-owned and state-leased centres at €13.50 per person per night. But housing is only the beginning!

Every refugee with an asylum residence permit between the ages of 18 and 67 is legally required to complete a civic integration program called inburgering: Dutch language instruction to high levels, civic orientation covering the legal system, Dutch history, the practicalities of daily life, and a structured pathway to employment, all managed at the municipal level under the 2021 Civic Integration Act. There are even three tailored learning routes depending on the individual’s background and capabilities. Newcomers have three years to complete the program, must sign a declaration of solidarity with Dutch values, and must pass a formal exam to obtain a civic integration diploma, without which they cannot apply for permanent residence or citizenship. The program can even be started while the person is still abroad, ideally before they arrive.

Clearly, the Dutch system is not perfect, and it has been criticized plenty for placing too much financial burden on refugees themselves, while the EU has questioned whether fining people who fail the exam is compatible with EU law. But the institutional architecture in the Netherlands exists, it is funded, it is mandatory, and it was built before the refugees arrived, because the Dutch understood that absorbing people is an institutional undertaking and that, as such, the institutions need to be in place before the first person shows up.

This feels pretty damn common-sensical, right?

Yes. Indeed, Denmark does the same. Austria, France, Germany, the same. Across the pond in the other direction, Canada sets annual immigration targets based on modeled absorption capacity across housing, health, education, and the labor market, and adjusts the number of immigrants it takes in each year depending on what the institutions can handle. Meaning that if the state’s ability to absorb people falls, the immigration target falls with it.

I don’t know how to say this clearly enough. These are not exceptional achievements by exceptional countries. This is pretty much the minimum institutional process that any serious state builds before the first person arrives.

So, what does Ireland have?

None of this.

No integration agency. No mandatory language program at scale. No civic orientation. No state-owned reception infrastructure in practice, 900 beds in a country that needed 33,000. No absorption modeling. No intake targets tied to capacity. No community engagement framework. No exit pathway from emergency accommodation into independent living.

And the reason is not that Ireland couldn’t afford these things; because by now we’ve read enough of what I’ve written to know that this is a country with a €23 billion surplus and the highest GDP per capita in Europe! The reason is that the state chose to write cheques and give subsidies instead of building institutions, which is the same choice it has made in housing, in health, in energy, and in every other sector where the Failure Premium now runs to billions of euros per year.

T is for Two-Tier

Migration Series by the incredible Jacob Lawrence

What Ireland had instead of a policy was two completely different responses to two groups of people, both arriving into the same institutional vacuum, yet both needing the same housing, healthcare, education, a way to get a job, but receiving radically different treatment based on which war they were fleeing and how useful that war was to Ireland’s diplomatic positioning.

For the more than 100,000 Ukrainians, the response was immediate and generous. This group were given the right to work from day one, with full social welfare, medical cards, school places for over 15,000 children, and €800 a month tax-free to families who hosted them through the Accommodation Recognition Payment scheme (which at its peak was supporting 42,000 people at an annual cost exceeding €141 million).

Ireland went three times beyond the EU per capita minimum. This was not because Brussels required it (Ireland had opt-outs it could have exercised and could have met its obligations through financial contributions alone, and not taking a single person!), but out of an instinct rooted deep in our national story. As we’re fully aware, Ireland is a country that was colonized for centuries and later exported its people for two more. The Famine, the coffin ships, and the generations who left because the country couldn’t sustain them. This history created a genuine impulse to open the door to immigrants, because we know what it feels like when we’re on the other side. And that impulse is honorable. But an impulse is not a policy.

The government leaned on the emigrant identity to justify decisions that felt right emotionally but were never backed by any of the practical infrastructure that compassion actually requires. We opened the door, but then what happened next? We did nothing for the people who walked through it, because the warm-and-fuzzy feeling of opening the door was the entire point.

That was the Ukrainian experience. The experience of everyone else was worse.

For the more than 30,000 asylum seekers from Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Jordan, and elsewhere, there was no Famine memory invoked and therefore no emigrant solidarity extended. Our response to them was actively hostile by design: only €38.80 a week, a six-month work ban, being placed in requisitioned hotels with no services, years-long processing during which their lives withered away, an eventual 70% rejection rate, and in 2023, people being forced to sleep rough because the state ran out of hotel rooms. That is, until the High Court ruled the failure unlawful.

The legal distinction between the two groups (of Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians) is real. The EU Temporary Protection Directive was activated collectively for Ukraine, the first time the mechanism had been used since 2001, while asylum seekers go through individual case assessment. But this legal difference does not explain why Ireland chose to treat the two groups so differently, as other countries faced the same legal framework and didn’t.

Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordics all activated temporary protection for Ukrainians and also run functional asylum systems that treat refugees from other conflicts with comparable basic dignity, treating them with reception centres, language training, integration programs, and structured pathways to work and housing. The legal categories differ between the two groups, but the basic institutional treatment of them by our European peers is recognizably human in both cases.

Ireland created something else entirely, and I’ll cut through the noise here. What now exists is a two-tier immigration system so extreme in its disparity that it is difficult to describe as anything other than horrifying. The only variable that meaningfully distinguishes who got warmth and who got hostility is where they came from and what they look like, because both groups arrived into the same country, both needed the same things, and both got the same institutional vacuum. Only one got generous workarounds. This was not an EU requirement. This was an Irish choice, made in Dublin, by Irish politicians, and it underscores everything about why we actually opened the door in the first place.

Because this was not moral leadership, it was a cosplay of moral leadership, performed for applause at European summits.

Genuine moral leadership would have looked completely different. It would have meant treating all refugees with comparable basic dignity regardless of which war they were fleeing, and setting an intake target tied to what the country could actually absorb, so that the commitment matched the capacity.Instead, Ireland committed to three times the EU average during the worst infrastructure crisis in the state’s history, and built nothing to absorb them. The cost of that performance was borne entirely by the people who could not opt out of its consequences, which included the immigrants who were warehoused and abandoned, and the communities that were never prepared and never resourced.

C is for Cruelty

The cruelty of this system runs in every single direction, and it is important to trace it properly, because understanding who it hurts and how is the only way to have this conversation without descending into the tribal screaming match that the government has wholly relied on to avoid accountability.

I’ll start with the cruelty to the people who arrived, because it begins with them.

“Shared Space: Life at the Courtown Hotel” by JP Keating, whose work I came across two years ago.

More than half a million people have arrived into a country with no integration infrastructure, reception capacity, or no institutional framework for absorbing them. Ireland’s IPAS system spent €129 million in 2019 housing roughly 7,500 people. By 2025 it was spending €1.2 billion housing 33,000, at an average cost of €99 per person per night, with over 90% of the money flowing to commercial operators because the state only had 900 beds of its own.

(The Netherlands houses comparable numbers in state-built centres at €13.50 a night. Over seven years, the cumulative Failure Premium on IPAS alone was approximately €3 billion: the measurable, quantifiable cost of not having built a reception system.)

But behind those numbers are human beings who were promised safety and given limbo. Asylum seekers warehoused in hotel rooms for years, forbidden from working for six months, given no language support, no mental health services, no way to contribute or build anything resembling a life, and then after years of waiting, years of their lives spent staring at the walls of a requisitioned hotel in a town where they knew nobody and nobody knew them, all they had was a 70% chance of being told no, to start again somewhere else, in another country entirely.

Ukrainians were were housed in spare rooms and hotels for four years while their children put down roots in Irish schools, learned English, made friends, joined GAA clubs, only to be told in April 2026 that they have three months to find somewhere to live in a rental market with a sub-1% vacancy rate.

The state invited these people, human beings with dreams and talents and children and plans for their lives, and absorbed them into communities, let only some of their children integrate while letting some of them start to believe that the worst was behind them, and is now pulling the floor out from underneath them because it still, after four years and billions of euros, never built a single unit of permanent accommodation for any of them, nor a strategy for how any of this might end. This is not a policy failing, it is cruelty administered in slow motion, bookmarked at the beginning with a standing ovation in Brussels and at the end with an eviction notice.

And then there is the cruelty to the communities that received them, which is where the political class’s cowardice becomes most visible.

No community in Ireland was properly engaged before an IPAS centre was placed in it. Just as no additional GP capacity was commissioned, no school places were added, no community liaison officers were appointed, and no language classes were organized. The government simply requisitioned the hotel and dusted off their hands as they left, ensuring the local communities dealt with the enormity of this human transition alone.

Hotels were removed from tourism, and the ecosystem around them began to die. In Roscrea, the only hotel in the town was converted to an IPAS centre, as the town lost its only venue for weddings and tourist accommodation overnight, with no replacement. The tourism economies around these hotels, built over decades by people who had nothing to do with immigration policy, were hollowed out in months.The Accommodation Recognition Payment, at €800 a month tax-free, was a more profitable income in rural places than renting to an Irish tenant was, meaning that the government once more inflated the same housing market that its HAP payments claimed to be fixing. That is, until it said “oopsie”, reduced the payment and admitted the “unintended impact on the private rental sector.”

Into this institutional nothingness, a horrific zero-sum competition emerged that should never have existed, yet persists relentlessly to this day.

Now, the professional class has, thus far, mostly experienced immigration as something that has enriched their lives. Think about the new restaurants, the diverse classrooms for the kids, and the interesting colleagues who bring mithai into the office after their trips back home. Why a feeling of enrichment over resentment? Simply because this same professional class has already exited every public system where the competition for resources occurs.

I wrote about this in Mind the Gap, and here it is again: private insurance meant GP capacity was irrelevant, while home ownership meant housing and expensive rent was someone else’s problem. Indeed this class experiences immigration through the lens of choice; immigrants appear as an addition to a life that already had everything it needed.

Leo Varadkar recently said on a podcast that he lives in a majority-immigrant community in Dublin and he loves it. I have no doubt he is telling the truth, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that his experience is likely very genuine! But his positive experience is purchased by his exit from every system where the competition actually occurs. He does not need a GP from a closed list. He does not need social housing or rely on a bus route. I doubt he has ever competed for a school place or a housing list position with anyone, immigrant or Irish, in his life. This is not a personal failing, it is a structural condition: the people who make and defend immigration policy in Ireland interact with an entirely different version of the state than the people who bear its consequences.

For the family in Finglas on the GP waiting list, for the single mother in emergency accommodation (I have had several email me in the last week alone!), or for the young couple priced out after five years of saving, immigration is experienced as direct competition for resources the state had already failed to provide.

Even before the war in Ukraine, the state had not built enough; and this is especially true now. So every housing unit allocated to a new arrival was visibly taken from the existing pool of people who have been waiting. Emergency accommodation was granted to asylum seekers while Irish families remained on housing lists for a decade. Medical cards were given for refugees while Irish workers paid €60 per GP visit. School places were allocated to new arrivals while local children were waitlisted.

Again, this is not a moral argument (although there certainly is one to be made). Rather, I am making a structural argument. You simply cannot meet humanitarian obligations by reallocating from a pool that was already empty.

This is what happens when a state forces its most vulnerable people to play musical chairs. There are ten people and two chairs, and instead of building more chairs, the government decides to add three more people to the game, before acting bewildered when everyone starts fighting.

Simply put, you do not need a PhD in rocket science to figure out that you cannot get “something” from “nothing”.

When you house refugees in hotels while Irish families sleep in their cars, you have not solved a problem, you have created severe competition, and competition for scarce resources between vulnerable populations is one of the most dangerous things a government can produce.

And when those communities said so; when the people who had been failed by the state for decades pointed at the hotel and said “this isn’t working”, they were called racist. By politicians with private healthcare, by commentators who owned their homes, and by an establishment class that had likely experienced precisely zero competition for any public resource in their entire lives.

Now, some of the objection was racist, and I want to acknowledge that honestly, because some of it was ugly and violent and targeted at individuals who had done nothing except arrive in a country that had seemingly invited them warmly. Sixteen arson attacks were carried out at sites housing refugees in 2023, and that is disgusting and criminal, full stop.

But the bulk of what happened in communities across Ireland was not racism. It was people doing the basic arithmetic that should have existed in long-term planning and strategy policies. People who had watched the state fail them for decades, who had never been able to exit the public system that was crushing their lives, who had no private insurance and no savings and no second option, watching the state suddenly find resources for someone else that it had never found for them.

The real bait-and-switch here, of course, is that the resources weren’t ever real; not for the immigrants or for those needing them long before the immigrants arrived. They were just hotel rooms, borrowed at a premium of €99 a night. But the perception was real, and the perception was correct: the state was prioritizing emergency provision for new arrivals over chronic deprivation for its own citizens, because the infrastructure emergency was visible before an influx of immigration, and that same deprivation had become invisible through decades of normalization.

However, dismissing that as racism is how you actually guarantee it eventually becomes racism, because you have told people that the only language available to express a legitimate grievance is the language of the far right. The leaders of the far right almost always offer the wrong explanation. But the question they are answering is the right one, and it is arguably the most important question in contemporary Irish public life: why is everything getting harder when we are told the country has never been richer?

The government’s failure to answer that question honestly, and to engage with it as a legitimate expression of lived experience rather than dismissing it as bigotry, is precisely how you will end up with Tommy Robinson on O’Connell Bridge. You don’t get far-right populism because people are stupid. You get it because the people with the right answers (or indeed any inclination to think about the question at all) refuse to show up.

The cruelty here is not that the political class disagrees with the working class about immigration. The cruelty is that the political class built itself a private Ireland, with private health, private housing, private transport, and private schools, and then told the people stuck in public Ireland that their experience of decline was a moral failing.

M is for Middle Class

Everything I have described so far happened primarily to the working class and to the most vulnerable communities in Ireland. The middle and professional class were largely insulated, as I have discussed before, because they had exited the public systems where the competition occurred. They had private insurance, owned homes, and drove cars. The negative consequences of immigration were something that happened to other people in other towns.

Well, that insulation is about to end.

The EU-India Free Trade Agreement, signed in January 2026 and described by both sides as the “mother of all deals,” creates the world’s largest free trade zone encompassing two billion people and includes provisions that make it dramatically easier for skilled Indian workers to move to EU countries for employment, the most generous terms of this kind that the EU has ever offered to any trading partner.

The Taoiseach called it “a breakthrough” and “a positive opportunity.” Fianna Fáil MEPs called it “a big win for Ireland.” Ministers flew to New Delhi to talk about selling Irish goods and services to the Indian market. Yet… Nobody in government mentioned what might come the other direction? There is, after all, no such thing as a free lunch.

The EU agreed to this because Europe’s working-age population is shrinking and there are genuine shortages in tech, healthcare, and engineering that local workers cannot fill. On the other hand, India has the largest surplus of young, educated, English-speaking professionals on earth, and the provisions for these people to be allowed to move into the EU was India’s central demand in return for the EU being able to access a new market of 1.4 billion consumers.

This may make strategic sense for the EU as a bloc, and it may make sense for Germany, which has 84 million people, a functioning integration system, and a desperate need for engineers. It makes considerably less sense for Ireland, a country of five million people with no integration infrastructure, no housing capacity, and a tech sector that is actively shedding jobs. But Ireland doesn’t get its own version of the deal. Brussels negotiates for all 27 states, and Ireland receives the same terms as everyone else.

Thus, the Indian professionals who take advantage of these new terms will move to whichever EU country is easiest to get to, find work in, and build a life in. And every factor points at Ireland: English-speaking, common law, Google, Apple, Meta and Intel already operational, work permits processed in 7 to 15 days, residency after two years, citizenship after five. Indeed, even before this monumental deal, Ireland is approving nearly 40,000 work permits a year, with every major Indian immigration consultancy now featuring Ireland as a top destination. The pipeline of Indian tech talent is already open; this deal just makes it faster, at precisely the moment when the US is making H-1B visas harder to get, turning Europe into the obvious alternative and Ireland into the front door.

Now, suffice to say that Ireland is not powerless here. Work permits, visa policy, salary thresholds, and occupation lists are all controlled by Dublin, not Brussels. Ireland could tighten the eligible occupations list, raise salary thresholds, cap the number of permits, or slow down processing at any time. It has every tool it needs to manage what is coming. But then, it had every tool it needed to manage the last half a million arrivals too, and chose not to use a single one of them.

Further, now consider the economics of this situation, because this is where the deal we were handed by the EU becomes brutal for the Irish professional class. The tech sector in Ireland has been laying off staff since 2022. The government’s pitch is that Indian professionals will fill skills shortages, but multinationals do not think in terms of skills shortages. They think in terms of cost.

A company that can hire an Indian engineer on a Critical Skills permit at €44,000 (who is tied to that employer for the first twelve months, whose residency depends on the job, and who will work evenings and weekends without pushback because their visa status requires continued employment), has very little reason to pay €75,000 to an Irish graduate who has options, leverage, and the freedom to walk to a competitor.

The result is not that Irish professionals will be fired overnight, but that the floor will drop out gradually as salaries flatten and the ability of Irish workers to negotiate erodes. This means that the roles that used to go to Irish and EU graduates will increasingly go to Indian professionals who are equally qualified, often more experienced, and willing to accept conditions that someone with a mortgage and a permanent right to remain in Ireland would not! And as tech companies continue to cut costs in the post-pandemic, AI-riddled economic correction, the incentive to replace expensive local hires with cheaper, visa-dependent international ones will only grow. We have seen this time and time again, geography after geography.

Ok, cut to the chase. What am I trying to say here?

Well, in short, it’s that the middle class is about to experience what the working class has experienced for years: brutal competition for their livelihood in a system designed by employers, enthusiastically endorsed by the Irish state, and built without any institutional framework to manage the consequences.

Unlike the asylum seekers in Cahersiveen, these high skilled workers will directly compete at the middle class’s price point, for the same apartments in Ranelagh, the same crèche places in Sandymount, and the same GP practices in Dún Laoghaire that are already closed to new patients. And the state has built nothing for these professional classes in a bid to absorb what is coming, just as it built nothing for anybody else.

But there’s more! Because when the middle class loses in this game, they don’t disappear. They move down. The professional who can no longer afford Ranelagh moves to Finglas, and now competes for the same housing, services, and school places as the working class who were already there.

The state is creating a second game of musical chairs on top of the first one, and the losers from the new game get added to the existing one, intensifying the competition for people who were already losing.

Look, this is not about Irish people versus Indian people. An Irish child might lose a school place to another Irish child whose family was pushed out of a more expensive area by competition that originated somewhere else entirely. The damage doesn’t flow neatly along national or racial lines. It flows along class lines, downwards (always downwards), because that is the direction that pressure travels in a system with no institutional capacity to absorb it. The point is not about the skin color or nationality of who is competing. The point is that the competition exists at all, that it was entirely avoidable, and that the state created it by refusing to build anything.

The working class was told to be quiet about immigration because it was good for the economy. The middle class is about to discover what that actually means, and they are going to discover it in their rent, their salary negotiations, their children’s school places, and their career prospects, in a country that cannot house the people it already has and whose government just celebrated the deal that will accelerate everything I have described.

G is for Gaslighting

And so we arrive at the present moment, where the government has finally begun to realize that it has created a disaster, and its response to that realization has been to keep telling us the economy has never been stronger and our lives have never been better, and to treat anyone who questions that narrative as ungrateful, uninformed, or worse.

In April 2026, the government announced a phased six-month plan to end state-provided accommodation for 16,000 Ukrainians who arrived before March 2024. Only those deemed “highly vulnerable” will continue to qualify. The hotels will be returned to tourism or the rental market, or alternative uses. The Accommodation Recognition Payment, which supports around 42,000 people in hosted arrangements, will be wound down and fully terminated by March 2027.

Consider what this means in human terms. These people were invited and were housed in hotels and spare rooms for four years, with no plan for what came next, because the government never built the strategy or institutions that would provide a next step. Their children that are enrolled in Irish schools learned English, made friends, and joined sports clubs. Some of the parents of these kids found jobs and became meaningful parts of Irish communities. They built lives for themselves. And now, after four years and billions of euros, the government is telling 16,000 of them that they have three months to find somewhere to live in a rental market where a two-bed in Dublin costs €2,241 a month, properties are taken within an hour of being listed, and the vacancy rate is below one percent.

Where exactly are they supposed to go?

The answer, for many of them, is nowhere. Which means homelessness. Which also means the Irish state will have invited 113,000 people into the country, housed them for four years at enormous cost, allowed their children to integrate into Irish schools and communities, and then pushed them out because it still, after all that time and all that money, had not built a single unit of permanent accommodation for any of them, despite being fully aware of the fact that they do, indeed, exist.

And now the Minister for Justice is considering paying Ukrainians to return to a country that is still at war, because after four years and billions of euros, paying people to leave is still cheaper than building somewhere for them to live. The Failure Premium has reached its final form, in that the state is writing cheques to undo the consequences of the cheques it wrote before.

And so we enter the gaslighting phase.

The government knows it has created a problem which is overwhelmingly complex and not easily fixable. It knows, because I assume at least some of them have read my previous articles, that the institutional vacuum is the cause. And rather than filling the vacuum, which would require building things, and which the state has demonstrated over decades that it cannot or will not do, it is trying to make the problem disappear by telling the people it invited that they are now on their own.

That brave compassion which was performed at EU summits has been quickly withdrawn and replaced by a three-month eviction notice in Tralee.

Meanwhile, the IPAS population of tens of thousands of residents across hundreds of centres including thousands of children, remains warehoused with no exit pathway, no integration infrastructure, and a processing system that rejected an overwhelming number of applications. The asylum seekers, the ones who were met with grave suspicion rather than the solidarity the Ukrainians were met with, who were given €38.80 a week rather than €800 a month, and who were housed in hotels with fences rather than spare rooms with families, are still exactly where the state put them, in the same institutional limbo, years later, waiting.

Labour calls the Ukrainian withdrawal “immoral and unethical,” which is interesting coming from a party that was in government when social housing construction was at historic lows. The Greens accuse the government of “pandering to anti-immigration sentiment,”; from a party that was in coalition when IPAS spend went from €183m to over €1 billion with zero institutional capacity built. The Social Democrats warn it will intensify pressure on the rental market, the same rental market that was in crisis before a single refugee arrived because the state never built housing.

And now the gaslighting is complete. The entire political class has moved from performing compassion to performing outrage at the consequences, while having actively created the very conditions that produced the crisis.

This is what the absence of institutional capacity ultimately produces: a state that cannot solve problems, but only defer them, and that when the deferral finally becomes untenable, abandons the people it was supposed to help while blaming them for the mess it has, itself, made.

What I think is an accurate description of our immigration process to date, is the following:

1. The government performed solidarity when it was cheap and popular

2. …. while outsourcing the cost to communities that were never supported

3. … in turn allowing a small class of asset holders to profit enormously from the arrangement.

4. … before ever-so-discreetly trying to reverse the whole thing because the political cost has finally exceeded the diplomatic benefit that has long been forgotten about.

More than half a million people have already arrived, and there was nowhere to put them. The next half a million are coming, and there is still nowhere to put them. At what point do we stop calling this a policy failure and start calling it what it is: a humanitarian crisis, produced by a wealthy state on its own people and on the people it invited in equal measure, because it refused to build?

A state that builds institutions absorbs the cost once. Ireland never built them, and has shown no indication that it intends to start. Yet until it does, every future arrival will land in the same nothingness, and every person already here will pay the same price for it.

There are no winners in this story, because there sadly never were. There were only people who realized they were losing and were told to shut up about it, and people who still don’t realize that they’re likely next.

And in the meantime, the vacuum has done exactly what vacuums do. It has turned everyone on each other. The entire country is now fighting over scraps of a system that was never built, while the political class that created the conditions for all of it watches from Leinster House, now performing a new role: the reasonable adult in a room full of people they drove mad.