The capitalist system is failing the Irish working class. For increasing numbers of people it is failing to provide secure housing, meaningful employment, or functional healthcare. And rather than answer for that failure, the government has chosen to weaponize it. Migrants, refugees and asylum seekers have been cast as scapegoats, their presence manipulated to redirect the fury of the working class sideways and downward. Never upward, never toward those truly responsible.
This is a deliberate capitalist strategy of division. They want us punching across at each other rather than up at the class that hoards our resources. Our crisis is not one of people, it is one of power and wealth. We must fight those who dominate our collective resources, not those who arrive here with even less than us.
The rot is embodied in figures like senior government politicians. TDs are caught scamming their way to oversized mansions and sprawling property portfolios while lecturing working people about belt-tightening. It is landlord profiteering and the political refusal to build adequate council housing that has created the housing emergency. It is the deliberate underfunding and creeping privatisation of our health service that leaves people waiting years for basic care.
The resources exist to fix this. Ireland recorded a government surplus in excess of €12 billion in 2025. The state equally has the capacity to borrow funds if it really wanted to fund the projects needed to address the housing and infrastructure crises. The point is, these problems are solvable, but not by a political class more interested in enriching its donors than housing working class people. Instead, asylum seekers are warehoused in hotels and private facilities, expected to survive on €38.80 a week, while the owners of those buildings and hoteliers pocket hundreds of millions in government rent.
Deportation Flights
A process repeated within the ruthless series of deportation flights our government has carried out across recent years. In 2025, six charter flight operations removed 182 people who were subject to deportation orders from the State, notably Titilayo Oluwakemi Oyekanmi and her three sons who were deported to South Africa. Her sons Samuel, Joseph and Genesis, who are aged between five and 18, attended local schools and sports clubs in South Dublin. The family’s neighbours and friends had appealed to the Department of Justice not to proceed with the deportation, saying the family’s removal would be a huge loss to the area. Titilayo, who is originally from Nigeria, said she had sought asylum after being beaten by a gang and threatened at gunpoint in South Africa. She said she fears for her family’s safety. The family’s international protection application was rejected, and a subsequent appeal was unsuccessful. The Government has spent €3.1m on flights deporting failed asylum seekers over the last four years, this includes over €1m so far in 2026 alone on both chartered and commercial flights.
This ruthless immigration policy, increasingly resembling the ICE raids carried out on the streets of America, has become so extreme that even hard right former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has been compelled to warn that the government is engaging in what he called “performative cruelty” in its new immigration legislation.
We are now seeing our government putting millions into flights for people who are working, people who are contributing to society, often working in important and socially necessary jobs in our society. All of it to pacify a small but loud minority, and all of it to avoid pointing the finger where it truly belongs: at the real hoarders of wealth sitting above all of us within our society, profiting from these policies. Profit is being extracted from human misery, this is capitalism functioning exactly as designed.