FROM POLITICAL WRITERS

RECENT RIOTING IN the Irish Capital Dublin has led to the establishment of a secret committee whose brief is to prepare a strategy to actively discourage immigrants from coming to the country, even if it means re-introducing policies from the 1980s that led to mass emigration and Ireland being referred to as “Third World” in international media.

“It may be the only way to keep the numbers down,” says Donnagh Slash-Harrington, a Government insider. “EU membership, free movement of people, it all means if the entire population of Germany decided to come over there’s little we could do about it. That’s what these Ireland for the Irish eejits don’t get. We signed away our borders years ago It’s just that having spent hundreds of years crowding into other peoples’ countries, most Irish folk couldn’t conceive of the reverse happening. Indeed, when immigrants began to come in the early years of the century it was all very exciting. Remember the Polish builders and Czech hairdressers and strange exotic prostitutes?

“Then the country was driven over a cliff by Fianna Fail (no, don’t quote me on that, we’re in Government together for heaven’s sake), and the economy tanked and the money lenders came knocking and they went from building enough housing to repopulate China to building virtually no housing. And here we are. The country’s rich again, but everyone in it is piss poor. And twenty per cent of the country is foreign born. Living here is torture and the good burghers of Dublin Inner City want someone to blame.

“We can’t throw the foreigners already here out, but we can discourage more coming in. And if we really took on the Fitzgerald (that’s Garret, God rest him) mantle, we could so fuck up the economy that even Haitians would not want to live here. Clever, eh?

“Third World Ireland … it wasn’t such a bad place to live … and you could afford a house.”