SIMON HARRIS, YOU’VE saved my ass again. 

Because there was no column last week, the opportunity to comment on Ireland’s increasing public transport fares almost slipped away from me. Then the Tánaiste decided to open his mouth, and manna fell right out of it. 

As the government gear up for this autumn’s budget, the Fine Gael leader came out to promise that this would be a budget for “those who get up early every morning and go to work”. 

Well, that’s comforting, since just days earlier the government announced that those who would be getting up early and going to work by bus, Dart or Luas would soon be paying an average of 15% more per journey for the privilege. 

Having spent what seems like my entire adult life standing underneath those stupid LED signs that lie to you about when the bus is going to come, only for the bus to never come at all, I cannot say that I’m pleased that the cost of this experience is going back up. When the flat fare was introduced, I believed that the direction of travel for public transport prices in Ireland was positive, which made a nice change, since usually the direction of travel associated with public buses in Dublin is no direction at all, since they never goddamn show up.

Honestly, the introduction of the €2 90-minute flat fare was probably the only thing that placated me enough to stop me using a pair of pliers to pull out my fingernails and send them to the Dublin Bus head office of like some kind of psycho. Many conversations about the various failures of this government have been softened by ‘Ah, well, at least public transport has got cheaper’. Now that it’s gone, there’s really no telling what I’ll do, and I can’t be the only freak out there who feels the same way. 

But this isn’t about me, and what is really galling is the one-two punch of rhetoric that suggests ordinary people are being prioritised, right after yet another announcement that will disproportionately affect working people. 

The reason that the likes of Simon Harris use euphemistic phrases like ‘people who get up early’ is to create a sort of phantom outgroup. You can’t simply say ‘people who work’ because virtually everybody works. One of the main ways in which this government has justified itself throughout its various iterations over the years is that it has achieved ‘full employment’. 

To make the government look like the good guy, Harris has to make it seem like there’s some malevolent cohort of lazy, gadabout ne’er-do-wells out there and the budget will finally rescue us from them. The only problem is that no such cohort exists in any meaningful way, and so it falls flat on everyone who’s realised: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we’re pretty much all working pretty hard, here’.

Yes, some people are unemployed. Some people are underemployed. Some people don’t work a traditional job because they are carers. Some people don’t work because they can’t work. The bottom line is that we already have enough people getting up early that society should function healthily. Affordable housing is not out of reach because people aren’t setting their alarms. Energy prices aren’t out of control because there’s a preponderance of people at home playing their PlayStations instead of working. In short: the government has no excuse.

This approach should be especially transparent now since Leo Varadkar tried the exact same thing using the exact same wording back when he was Taoiseach. Sooner or later people are going to cop that there’s only so far you can get by pitting middle-income earners against imaginary scroungers.

But in case you haven’t noticed, this entire week has been defined by various cabinet ministers throwing their weight around. The last time a cabinet got this rowdy was when Gaston and his men tried to invade the castle towards the end of Beauty and the Beast. You know, because the furniture was alive and all that. Anyway.

Darragh O’Brien has suggested that those who can’t afford their heating bills should simply spend €50,000 or so retrofitting their homes. Jim O’Callaghan has been whittling the céad míle fáilte down into the single digits through a range of regressive immigration policies. Taoiseach Micheál Martin has taken up the very dignified position of arguing over what it truly means for a child to live in poverty (those stupid kids aren’t as poor as they think they are, in case you were wondering). 

This week, Minister of State for Migration Colm Brophy boasted that international protection applications had dropped by 39% since the introduction of the EU Migration Pact a few months. That’s interesting.

It’s interesting because it’s a test of another longstanding government narrative. For the last several years, we’ve been told in no uncertain terms that the influx of international protection seekers is directly related to an increase in house prices. It will be just as interesting to see what reason is proffered over the coming months when house prices do not fall, but in fact increase, as they have done virtually every quarter for the last 10 years. Maybe that’s when we’ll move on to blaming the people who don’t get up early enough, or whatever it is. 

Minister for Justice O’Callaghan seems to be determined to further sour Ireland’s relationship with immigration, this week announcing several new immigration requirements that sound tough while offering no tangible benefit to Irish society beyond making it harder to become a part of it. 

As opposition politicians have pointed out this week, increasing the amount of time someone needs to have lived in Ireland from five to eight years before they can become a citizen seems to be based purely on vibes. Eight years is a longer wait time than exists in Germany, France, the United Kingdom or the US. It also seems intuitive that the longer someone has to wait to become a citizen, the less invested they are going to be in the overall health and prosperity of Irish society. 

It has been shown time and again that Ireland’s economy, and indeed its society, is heavily dependent on the work of immigrants. Over half of all nurses working in Ireland were trained abroad, for example. This figure is roughly 40% when it comes to doctors. 

When one ties all of these strands together, it seems like the government is making clear who it sees as the enemies of Irish prosperity. Poor children and the people who take up their cause, for example, or an imaginary abundance of people spending all day in bed like the grandparents from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And of course, let’s not forget the immigrants who — according to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) — have added more to the Irish economy than Irish-born residents have over the last 20 years.

One of the justifications offered for these weird new immigration policies is that they will bring Ireland “in line” with the rest of the European Union. What a time to make that point. This very week, the German far-right stole a major victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt — even after the centrist German establishment kowtowed to their rhetoric and introduced stricter border controls in late 2024. 

It is transparent that O’Callaghan, Martin and the government are trying to score a political victory by positioning themselves as tough on immigration. They may succeed in bringing Ireland “in line” with Europe — but only in the sense that they are rendering themselves irrelevant in the face of far-right fearmongering for which the centre offers no counter-narrative. 

Ah, well, at least public transport has got chea— oh, wait. Screw it, then.