Is Noel Grealish a racist? On a scale of one to 10

Is Noel Grealish a racist? On a scale of one to 10, like. One being not racist at all, and 10 rabidly racist. Certainly, his comments were racist.

At a meeting in Oughterard last week, the Independent Galway West TD, described Christian refugees fleeing Syria, as “genuine”; but African asylum seekers (and for African, we read ‘black’) were “economic migrants” who come to Ireland to “sponge” off the system.

The ones earmarked for the Connemara Gateway Hotel (which it has not yet been officially confirmed will be turned into a Direct Provision centre), would be the latter, opined the former Progressive Democrat.

The remarks were nasty, and hurtful to Africans living here and people in Oughterard and asylum seekers, many of whom, as An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar pointed out, are “fleeing war and fleeing persecution” and it is right that we, as a country, should take some people in.

Almost everybody – bar the mandarins in the Department of Justice, who are tasked with finding Direct Provision (DP) centres – is opposed to Oughterard as a base to house asylum seekers.

Leaving aside the arguments against Direct Provision as a system, even if you were fully supportive of DP, you couldn’t argue that Oughterard was an appropriate place for up to 300 asylum seekers. It just couldn’t cope and it would be wrong for both those seeking refuge, and locals.

Part of the reason why refugees are fleeing here is because we’re a stable democracy, where freedom of speech is sacrosanct and we value people’s right to express opinions. But we can recognise Noel Grealish’s right to say something, while rejecting completely what he said as racist.

Noel’s comments were wrong, too, because they stoked the flames of an already tense situation, and as a public representative, his language should have been more measured.

Even if it were true that some of those coming here are economic migrants; so what? Irish people have been emigrating for economic reasons for donkeys’ years. Noel himself has family in the US; he knows many undocumented Irish living abroad, those forced overseas because the country was broke – and broken. Hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Pensioners, school students, and local community groups know ‘Noeleen’ as the sound lad who buys them lunch during tours of Dáil Éireann. Carnmore hurlers know him as the sound lad who gets the pints in the local after championship games. His Oireachtas colleagues know him as the sound lad who’s handy on the golf course. Constituents, and those who work with him, know he’s a sound TD who gets things done; little things like filling out social welfare forms. It’s what gets him elected.

What ‘Noeleen’ said about African economic migrants being spongers was far from sound. It was ugly, and disappointing. And now the mask has slipped, everybody in the country knows him as the man at the centre of a racism storm in a small, picturesque town in Connemara.

For more Bradley Bytes, see this week’s Galway City Tribune