Get them Out! Immigration +Housing
It felt like floods of people were arriving all at once and there was no where to put them.
Floods of people were arriving all at once and there was no where to put them.
Standing outside a garda station, she roared “Get them out!” with a baby in her arms and one in a pram. Her image was captured by a phone and replayed for miles around.
12,000 homeless people isn’t that many, they said, we’ll be alright for another few years yet. Once it doesn’t sound like too big a number we’ll be okay, they said - secure in the knowledge that the market does look after their voters. Their voters believe that they had to work for what they have so why should anyone be handed a house for free.
“Get them out!” she screams again, and the video goes everywhere. Another mother watches it as she tries to get her own kids to sleep, they haven’t slept since they got here, and now she’s too afraid to sleep herself so she stands vigil at the window.
She’s called a racist, she’s told that she’s been tricked, that she needs to direct her anger at the government. She is agonisingly patronised online and in real life. People judge, make her feel uncomfortable at the school gates. People try to have courageous conversations with her and it makes her feel sick. She get’s DMs from people who agree with her and she makes new friends.
Nobody understands the power she holds.
Least of all her.
She downloads an app, clicks a few hashtags, joins a zoom meeting and all of a sudden she’s in the fabled far right.
She calls her new interests and her new apps ‘politics’ and ‘community organising’. She starts talking to other mothers there. They are from all different backgrounds. they create a separate thread and they start to connect. Some make comments about people in social housing and she pipes up, she corrects assumptions and they love her for it. They start to each post links, they tell long stories on voice notes to each other and what they naturally find that the root of all their problems is housing.Some of the men in the main group start to post things that make them uncomfortable, threatening violence. She challenges this but gets shut down. She deletes the apps, goes dark for a while, until one of the women shows up at her door in person.
They drink tea, they laugh, they talk, they make a plan.
“Get them out!” she screams. This latest terrifying video makes its way around the whatsapp groups of power, because alongside her stand women screaming “get them out” in all different accents. Its us they want out now. Some of them could be voters. What have we done to upset the actual voters? They wonder, but they stay inside Leinster House and watch it being live streamed on their phones. Send a few tweets saying they are fascists. But a small group of women TDs go out one by one.
“We have enough room for everyone if they would agree to build public homes on public land. They stole all our land, made us desperate and afraid, and expected us to welcome floods of suffering people to our door when we were suffering, we were suffering and no one was listening.” One long established TD started to form a retort by raising her hand in a pointing motion but another gently pulled her hand away. Listen she gestured. Listen. “And when we couldn’t do that they made us feel guilty and ashamed of ourselves.” They talked for hours and arranged a follow up meeting the next day.
As two of the women TDs walk back to Leinster House one asks the other how did this happen? We wanted them to move their ire from the garda stations to the gates of Leinster House years ago. We told them to do that and they didn’t listen to us. We tried to have courageous conversations with them, none of it worked. Why did it work just now? She said, kinda giddy. The other woman TD stopped her on the velvetted steps and said “You listened”. “Did I?” she said, and she had a small tear. “Get them out” said one woman TD to another “Get them out indeed” chuckled her sister.
