With finite housing and overstretched public services, the government’s ‘cack-handed’ border policies have triggered a wave of public anger
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.”
We have the same evil pricks in Canada.
