Following a quarter-century of immigration, however, more than 20 percent of Ireland’s population is now foreign-born, and the immigrants keep coming; the number of asylum-seekers increased by 415 percent last year. According to Ireland’s Newstalk programme, 70 percent of those immigrants were male, and almost 40 percent had false or no passports. On the rare occasions on which an immigrant is ordered to be deported, only around one out of every seven deportation orders are actually carried out.
By the end of 2024, government spending on welfare payments is expected to have tripled from that of 2020. And this increase comes at a time when two-thirds of Irish people under 40 cannot afford to purchase a home and an unprecedented number of Irish people are homeless. Ireland is wealthy on paper—particularly thanks to the pharmaceutical and tech companies headquartered around Dublin—but much of that supposed “foreign investment” involves a kind of corporate tax dodge—and the cost of living has skyrocketed. To ease the strain on Dublin, the government has been shipping immigrants to rural areas en masse. In some country villages, asylum-seekers now outnumber Irish.
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