Mark O'Connell: A win for Gerry Hutch in Dublin would be a canary-in-the-coal mine parable
Say what you like about Daniel Kinahan – a member of a super-cartel that runs about a third of the European cocaine market and who was arrested in Dubai last month on organised crime charges – but at least he has never publicly called for migrants to be rounded up and held in internment camps. The same cannot be said for Gerard Hutch, who, as patriarch of the Hutch gang, was for many years involved in a bloody territorial rivalry with Kinahan and who is now involved in a struggle for the electoral territory of Dublin Central. In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, Hutch suggested that the Government should close the borders and deport undocumented migrants, and that those who are in the country illegally should be “interned”.Hutch made the remarks in an interview with Gavin Pepper, an independent councillor for Ballymun-Finglas, conducted in what appears to be a boxing ring at Corinthians Boxing Club in the north inner city. Pepper, a relatively prominent figure within the anti-immigrant right, asked Hutch for his views on immigration – “a big topic on the doors and across the country at the moment”, as he put it. “Illegal immigrants,” Hutch responded, are “coming into England and France, and they’re mooching their way into southern Ireland, because it’s a freebie, and they’re getting paid. I think they should be all interned, they should be put in the Curragh, in camps, until they’re sorted.”READ MORELook inside: Substantial Edwardian with arts-and-crafts character on 1.2 acres in KillineyIreland is trying to fund environmental protection on the cheapDavid McWilliams: Iran war is now an international hostage situation - with UAE the hostageQ&A: Can television directors really decide which replays the rugby TMO sees?For fear that his comments might be perceived as somehow motivated by racism – or by the desire to exploit racist sentiments among the electorate – he was careful to make allowances for the “genuine” people who are needed to do jobs that we Irish have “gone too posh” to do ourselves. We don’t want our kids working at petrol pumps, he elaborated (somewhat anachronistically), or making burgers in McDonald’s – “we need foreign nationals coming in for them jobs, whether we like it or not”. Such “genuine” people are more than welcome to come here, he stressed, in order to do the kinds of jobs we Irish now consider ourselves too good for, whereas “the ones that are Somalians [sic] and them type of people – no way”. Well, useful to get that learnt.Hutch is a smart man. (See, as evidence, the fact that his alleged gangland rival is about to be extradited from the United Arab Emirates and put on trial on organised crime charges, while he himself is shaping up to become a TD.) He knows that there is political territory to be gained from saying things representatives of the mainstream parties are unwilling to say, and which a not-insignificant portion of the electorate is eager to hear. Some 26 per cent of respondents to a poll released this week said that they did not think that the EU was “moving in the right direction”; of that 26 per cent, the most commonly stated reason, given by 31 per cent of that 26 per cent, was “immigration control”. While not as hugely significant as some on the right might want to present it – 31 per cent of 26 per cent is a little over 8 per cent – it’s certainly not nothing, and there are surely voters to be had there.Not all those people, to be sure, would be willing to vote for a notorious gangland figure. Some of them, as Michael McDowell suggested in these pages earlier this week, might well be “decent Irish people” with “real concerns about migration”. (My fellow columnist, who as minister for justice proposed the 2004 referendum that resulted in the removal of the automatic right of citizenship for children born in Ireland to non-Irish parents, could fairly be said to have been well ahead of the prevailing winds on this question. In the US, Donald Trump has been struggling to get a sceptical supreme court to ratify an executive order revoking the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the US constitution’s 14th amendment.)But the idea of internment camps for migrants is, we must hope, well beyond what such decent people with real concerns could be expected to support. For all their concerns about “unvetted males” in Ipas centres, and the dire threat they believe them to pose to the native Irish population, the anti-immigrant right seem perfectly happy to support the political aspirations of a convicted criminal whose assets were just recently frozen by Spanish authorities as part of a continuing investigation into alleged money laundering. (Hutch has been largely resident in Lanzarote for much of the last decade.) All those asylum applicants would have to work very hard for a very long time to do to this country even a fraction of the damage inflicted on it by those who have enriched themselves through the drugs trade.Hutch’s flight of hard-right fancy was met with strong condemnation from some of his byelection rivals, though seemingly only those to his left. People Before Profit’s Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin called Hutch’s comments “absolutely racist”; Labour’s Ruth O’Dea called them “despicable”. Sinn Féin, notably, seemed more circumspect: the party’s candidate Cllr Janice Boylan called the comments “out of order”, but stressed a desire to focus not on what other candidates were saying but what she was hearing on the doors. At Boylan’s campaign launch, party leader Mary Lou McDonald responded to questions about Hutch’s comments by saying “We can’t comment on other people’s comments”, and “we’re very much focused on our own campaign”.I won’t presume to tell the leader of Sinn Féin how to do her job, because she clearly knows what she is doing here – which is to say that she clearly knows which voters she doesn’t care to alienate, and on which issues – but I would respectfully argue that we can indeed comment on other people’s comments, and that doing so is called politics. Not commenting on other people’s comments, even and perhaps especially when those comments are about putting migrants in camps, is also called politics. And politics is precisely what McDonald is doing here. The seat for which Hutch is contending, in Dublin Central, was recently vacated by former minister for finance Paschal Donohoe. If Hutch were to win it – and we’re presumably talking about a long shot here, but who the hell knows: he very nearly made it through in the last general election, after all – it would be hard to avoid seeing it as a sort of canary-in-the-coal-mine parable. Donohoe, one of the most talented and respected of centrist politicians, has left electoral politics to take up a role as managing director and chief knowledge officer of the World Bank, that crucial institution of free-market liberalism, making apparent a growing vacuum at the centre of Irish politics, and the populist right begins to fill that vacuum. The canary drops dead in its cage, and the poison in the air continues to thicken.
