How Soaring Migration Came Back to Bite Ireland’s Political Elite

Driving through Dublin in his taxi, Gavin Pepper gestures down a stretch of pavement. “You wouldn’t go there at night,” he says. “There’s gangs of foreign men hanging around all over the city. You don’t see many Irish people walking there any more.”

It’s the sort of forthright remark that tends to stay in a cabbie’s front seat. But Pepper no longer speaks only as a taxi driver. He’s now a councillor for Finglas, a working-class district of north Dublin, elected on a wave of public anger over migration.

He says his election was driven by a migration policy handed down from on high – imposed, as he puts it, by Ireland’s political elite on poorer communities with no say in the matter. “You’re punching a wall that won’t break,” he says. “They have all the money, all the power, all the NGOs.”

In response, he has built a viral following confronting ministers and rallying support from voters who feel overlooked. “Mount Street said no,” he says, referring to protests against continued high-levels of immigration that took place in an affluent Dublin neighbourhood. “And they got attention. We’re told to just get on with it.”

For Pepper – a Nigel Farage fan – immigration has become a front of a broader class war in an increasingly well-to-do Ireland. And these days he’s no longer shouting into the void.

Atlantic allies

Across the Atlantic, his message is echoed by powerful allies. In the White House on St Patrick’s Day, it wasn’t the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin who was the guest of honour, but MMA fighter Conor McGregor, grinning in a green pinstripe suit.

The Irish former martial arts champion is a divisive figure, recently found civilly liable for rape (which he denies). Yet that has not stopped him attempting an improbable shift from sporting icon to anti-immigration presidential hopeful – and finding vocal backing from Elon Musk. Invited as part of a private delegation, McGregor’s presence stunned Irish officials.

In the White House press room McGregor delivered a blunt message: the Irish government is overseeing an “illegal immigration racket” that is “running rampant”. Irish people in rural towns, he claimed, “have become a minority in one swoop”.

In some areas, the numbers appear to bear him out. Refugees now outnumber locals in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, and are expected to do so soon in Dundrum, Co Tipperary. But McGregor’s critics point to official census data – albeit three years old – to argue he is exaggerating. “Ballyhaunis in Mayo was the town with the highest proportion of non-Irish residents at 37 per cent,” a census release from 2022 noted. “Other towns with a large share of non-Irish citizens included the Longford towns of Ballymahon (33 per cent) and Edgeworthstown (31 per cent).” Martin, the taoiseach, called the remarks “wrong” and unreflective of Irish values.

That did not stop Musk sharing a clip of McGregor’s speech. It was watched 73 million times.

“It doesn’t surprise me in the least that a lot of people agreed with what he was saying,” noted Garron Noone, an Irish comedian, following McGregor’s remarks. “There absolutely is an immigration issue in Ireland… the government continually does not allow people to express their concerns.”

The backlash was so swift that Noone temporarily deactivated his social media accounts – inadvertently proving his own point about just how fraught the issue has become.

Immigration Ireland

Ireland’s population is growing faster – and becoming more diverse – than at any time since the 19th century.

For most of the 20th, it hovered just above three million. Today, it exceeds five million, growing far more rapidly than most other EU countries. In 2023 alone, the population rose by 3.5 per cent – far outpacing Britain’s 1 per cent – fuelled by non-EU migration and the arrival of over 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

Asylum applications have also surged. In the past decade, the number of asylum seekers housed in Ireland, mostly from Africa and Asia, has increased by 650 per cent, from 4,000 to over 30,000.

Ireland’s government has, in recent years, advertised the country as a lucrative destination for refugees. In 2021, then-minister for equality and integration, Roderic O’Gorman, issued a series of tweets – published in Arabic, Albanian, Somali, Urdu and French – pledging that new arrivals would receive “own-door” accommodation within months.

The message travelled. The following year, non-Ukrainian asylum claims in Ireland surged by 400 per cent. They arrived amid a housing crisis, with a shortfall of 250,000 homes. And the strain wasn’t evenly felt: it landed hardest in rundown estates and rural towns, where schools, hospitals and housing were already under pressure – and where, locals say, they were never warned or consulted.

Take Lissywollen, a down-at-heel town 70 miles to the west of Dublin. There Geraldine Stokes, a member of the Traveller community, found out via Facebook that a large asylum centre was being built beside her childhood home. She had heard the centre, a sprawling government-owned site minutes from a primary school and crèche, would house 200 men – then 1,000 – increasing the town’s population of 20,000 by 5 per cent.

“It was peaceful,” she says of early protests against the plans, made up mostly of local mothers. “But then it wasn’t safe anymore.”

The women, she claims, were verbally abused by some of the centre’s occupants. When the national Gardaí Síochána riot squad arrived, “they weren’t so nice either,” she says. “They were pushing people, putting their hands on them.”

Geraldine says officers warned she could be reported to child services for bringing her children along. “Where do you go from there?” she says. “If you say anything, you’re racist. We’ve had racism all our lives being Travellers. So that’s a bit of a kick in the teeth.”

An Garda Síochána said after the protests that no arrests were made and that it respects the right of citizens to “exercise their constitutional rights and to carry out peaceful protest”.

The council is now mounting a legal challenge against the use of the centre to house asylum seekers.

Street protests

Similar scenes have played out across Ireland. In Roscrea, County Tipperary, residents protested after the town’s only hotel was repurposed for asylum accommodation. Leo Varadkar, then-taoiseach, insisted no community had a “veto” over who moved into their area.

With emergency powers in place to bypass planning laws, he was technically correct. But this left residents with little recourse beyond legal challenges – or taking their objections to the streets.

While most protests remained peaceful, several in deprived areas turned violent. In Coolock, a run-down part of north Dublin, skirmishes erupted, with Gardaí pepper spraying and beating back protestors with riot shields. The planned asylum centre there was torched three times. By August 2024, there had been 33 arson attacks on asylum accommodation over the past 12 months.

Initially the protests were held up as evidence of the emergence of ugly “far-Right” politics, in which locals wrongly objected to the arrival of large groups of “unvetted” males into their communities. The government insisted the asylum seekers were screened and composed of vulnerable people of all demographics fleeing war.

There was significant fallout. A leaked government report cited a “marked drop” in properties offered up for migrant housing because of “legal, local and criminal challenges”. To avoid public flashpoints around hotels, the state began targeting less incendiary sites to house asylum seekers – nightclubs, banks, equestrian centres.

Then, slowly, the “far-Right” narrative started unravelling.

The justice minister admitted that more than 65 per cent of asylum applications were rejected in 2023 – rising to 80 per cent in January 2024. Taoiseach Martin later acknowledged – in a stunning about-turn – that most applicants were in fact “economic migrants”.

Government data shows that around half are single males. Last year, many arrivals in Dublin airport had destroyed their travel documents en route to Ireland. Now, most arrive via the border with Northern Ireland – which, at Dublin’s insistence during Brexit, has no infrastructure to monitor who enters the state.

Irish officials claim to use Eurodac, the EU’s centralised biometric database, to vet arrivals. However, records up to 2023 indicate that Eurodac has never been used by Irish police to conduct criminal or terrorism related background checks.

A string of high-profile crimes involving suspects of foreign-origin – some so outrageous as to be without precedent in Ireland – have intensified public unease. In 2022, Ashling Murphy, a 23-year-old school teacher was stabbed to death by a Slovak national while jogging. In Sligo, an Iraqi beheaded two men in a homophobic attack. In Dublin, a naturalised Algerian migrant stabbed multiple children. In New Ross, an eight-year-old girl, whose mother was an Irish convert to Islam, was allegedly killed by her partner.

Officials insist there is no link between migration and crime. But with nationalities omitted from crime statistics, many draw their own conclusions. Rumour and rage fill the vacuum left by the lack of reliable data.

An economic price

Then there’s the cost. In 2024, asylum support spending for both Ukrainian refugees and International Protection applicants soared to €1.8 billion – compared to just €150 million a decade ago. With planning laws suspended, much of the due diligence normally required for lucrative government contracts has quietly fallen away.

Mattie McGrath, an independent member of the Irish parliament, calls the ballooning, lightly-regulated industry a racket. “Fraud and deceit,” he says. “People are being taken for fools.”

He describes a situation in which the state is effectively outbidding its own citizens for hotel beds and other accommodation. Kilcoran Lodge – once central to local life in Tipperary – has been earmarked as an asylum centre. “Weddings, funerals, communions – it’s all gone,” McGrath says.

In Dundrum (population 220), plans were announced to house 280 asylum seekers. “That’s more than a 100 per cent change [in population numbers]. If that’s not a plantation, what is it?”

His use of the term “plantation” – a pointed reference to Ireland’s colonial past – has been condemned by the government as echoing “far-Right” rhetoric. But the anger he channels is no longer confined to rural meetings or late-night pub talk.

It’s now the talk in the fine-dining rooms of Killarney.

Paul Treyvaud, restaurateur and TV chef, is scathing about the effect on Irish tourism. “This is the worst winter I’ve ever seen. The industry – in my opinion – has been destroyed.” Treyvaud says Killarney has lost up to 40 per cent of its tourist accommodation. “It didn’t take a genius to figure out: remove the hotel beds, and tourism suffers.”

The financial incentives were clear. Hotels that once operated seasonally switched to state-funded, year-round occupancy – often with utilities and insurance covered. “They did very well,” Treyvaud says.

For rival businesses which stayed open, he says, the impact could be brutal: “Staff couldn’t find accommodation. The high street was decimated. I’m painting my own hotel now.” In Drogheda, he says, one hotel making €1 million annually was offered €13 million to convert to an asylum centre.

By early 2025, the impact was undeniable: tourist visits to Ireland had dropped 30 per cent year-on-year. Spending fell even further. “I was called a fascist, a Nazi – now the taoiseach says illegal migration is out of control,” Treyvaud says. “The same thing I was saying 18 months ago.”

Poisoned politics

The government appeared slow to grasp the scale of public discontent. As far back as February 2024, immigration had already overtaken housing as the nation’s top concern. A poll found more than a third of voters would support a hardline immigration party. A Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll found that 82 per cent backed a Rwanda-style returns system.

A hostile electorate and legal challenges softened the government’s approach. It held off on placing asylum seekers in areas where locals had protested, and issued more muscular statements on the need for deportations.

By November, the temperature had cooled. Only 6 per cent named immigration as their top concern in the national election exit polls. The centrist Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition was returned to power.

But the election showed that discontent was deeply entrenched. All three major parties – including the ostensibly nationalist but pro-mass-migration Sinn Féin – lost vote share or stagnated. Turnout fell to 60 per cent, the lowest since the foundation of the state. The Greens, widely blamed for coalition failings, were wiped out.

Several independent and small-party candidates running on migration and housing surged. Aontú, one of the few immigration-sceptic parties in the Dáil, doubled its vote share in some areas.

Its leader, Peadar Tóibín, says voters are waking up. Migrants have at times been given priority for housing, health, and transport. That must end, he says.

Tóibín rejects the “populist” label. “It is often used to condemn the democratic instincts of the electorate,” he says. But public trust in the state is eroding – and fast. Deportation orders go unenforced. Communities are left in the dark. Migrants, he says, have been bussed in “during the dead of night” – with little notice or consultation.

He recalls landlords being paid €800 a month – “tax-free”– to house Ukrainian refugees, far more than Irish tenants received in state support. It gave Ukrainians, he says, a “competitive advantage” in the housing market. In Donegal alone, one-in-10 rental properties was taken out of circulation.

Asylum seekers, meanwhile, received “very attractive” benefits – free healthcare, free transport – usually reserved for low-income Irish citizens.

These “cack-handed” policies were the brainchild of what he calls the establishment “bubble” – sometimes dismissively referred to as “Official Ireland”. “Anyone questioning policy is treated as beyond the pale.” As a result, he says, the “Irish people have been ahead of the government” on immigration.

As Tóibín sees it, the establishment is now being “pulled kicking and dragging back towards centre”, because they “had a reckoning with their electorate – who are fed up with virtue signalling and woke politics, from a uniform establishment distracted from bread and butter issues.”

A new island story

Yet as Ireland’s leaders scramble to regain control of the political narrative at home, a new one is being written abroad – often without them. Musk’s reposts carry Irish grievances far beyond the island’s borders. They’ve become ammunition in a broader clash playing out across the western world: over sovereignty, identity and elite complacency.

Last year, the Irish government proposed a sweeping hate speech bill – one that could, conceivably, have criminalised some of the posts shared by Musk, many of which cast Europe’s multicultural experiment in an unflattering light. Though the legislation was eventually shelved, many Irish politicians – like their British counterparts – seem convinced that racial harmony depends on narrowing the legal boundaries of acceptable speech.

Musk takes the opposite view: let people speak freely, and let the chips fall where they may.

For years, many Irish were hesitant to voice concerns about immigration. The country’s own emigrant legacy – generations who crossed the seas in search of a better life – made people reluctant to deny others the same chance. But the mood is shifting. To a growing number, the slogan “Ireland is full” no longer sounds xenophobic, but simply factual – a reflection of finite housing and overstretched public services.

Back in Dublin, Gavin Pepper keeps driving his taxi, and keeps speaking his mind. Some Dubliners recognise him and honk their horns. Many believe he is saying what others won’t. “Ireland belongs to the Irish,” Pepper insists. “Sinn Féin says Palestine belongs to the Palestinians – but we’re told Ireland belongs to everyone?” It’s the kind of message that now finds a warm reception in Washington. The question is: how far will it travel at home?