Losing the higher moral ground on immigration to Conor “Kebabs” Lenihan is not easy to do, so fair dues to Leo Varadkar for managing it so effortlessly.
The saddest thing about his suggestion that foreign unemployed workers be given a lump-sum payment if they agree to return home is not that it is racist, but that he genuinely doesn’t seem to realise that it is.
Surely he has only to ask himself what his gut reaction would be if some MP had suggested the same thing about unemployed Irish in the UK to see that his idea is just plain wrong.
He has denied having any racist intention, and complained “I think it’s a sad day when you can’t ask a question about welfare reform without being called a right-wing racist Nazi”.
Fine. But his question is not about welfare reform. It’s about trying not to give welfare at all to a group of people who were welcomed here when we needed them, whose taxes and PRSI we took at exactly the same rates as Irish workers, and whom we now don’t want, because we’ve to pay them now instead of the other way about. It’s about believing that they are less worthy of welfare, and the support and assistance of the state, than Irish people.
He will say it’s voluntary, and it may start that way. But foreigners in dole queues will now be people who’ve been offered money to return home, and turned it down. How will they be treated by the more racist neanderthals in our society? If they apply for a vacant job, will they be told “no, I’m giving it to an Irish guy, you should have fecked off when you were told to”?
If ever you needed proof that to many TD’s this is an economy rather than a society, then here it is in – if Mr Varadkar will forgive me – black and white.
