Not only is Ireland not suffering under the weight of mass migrant importation, according to effete Prime Minister Micheál Martin, but the processing of asylum claims has been “too slow.”
Via Fox News:
“Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin pushed back on the notion that Ireland has been “overrun” by immigrants as nearly one in four residents is now foreign-born, arguing that the country’s dramatic demographic change has been driven largely by legal migration tied to its economic success story.
Martin, in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, acknowledged failures in Ireland’s asylum system after a record surge in applications, saying it “was too slow” in recent years.
He also addressed moves to tighten citizenship rules and opened the door to publishing crime statistics by nationality amid a heated debate over immigration and crime…
“Ireland is not overrun in any shape or form,” Martin told Fox News Digital. “But we are conscious that it is an issue that has to be addressed robustly, firmly, fairly as well in terms of those seeking asylum.”…
“Obviously, illegal migration is the more potent issue. And our system was too slow in processing those seeking asylum. That has changed. We’ve accelerated the application and the consideration of applications, and we’ve also now accelerated the appeals process…
Critics of Ireland’s immigration policies have argued that migrants are disproportionately responsible for crime, while opponents of that view say such claims unfairly stigmatize the country’s growing foreign-born population. But the debate has been difficult to settle because Irish national crime statistics do not routinely publish nationality breakdowns, leaving limited public data to test competing claims.
The lack of data has prompted calls for greater transparency from women’s advocates and some Irish lawmakers, including proposals to publish crime statistics broken down by nationality.
“I’ve no issue with data … because that can inform, because sometimes you get a kind of distorted picture,” Martin said when asked whether crime statistics should include the nationality of alleged suspects.* “So as far as I’m concerned, data is important.”
But Martin pushed back on the argument that nationality itself drives crime.
“I don’t think crime is specific to any nationality,” he said. “But there are issues there, and in some cases, yes, there’s been horrific crimes committed, but not all by illegal migrants either.””
*Spoiler alert: Given his hedging here and his track record as a neoliberal globalist minion, his face-saving lie to Fox News notwithstanding, Martin in no way plans to actually allow the accurate collation of crime data by nationality, as the data would be a horrific indictment of mass migration.