Church of Ireland Primate Archbishop John McDowell has said that populists are playing with paranoia on the issue of migration, but that “Ireland is not full”.
“Fear and division-generating politics is not mature political discourse. It’s not real politics. It is playing with paranoia,” he said.
In his presidential address to the Church of Ireland General Synod which opened in Armagh on Friday, he said that populist politicians, activists and commentators “address and exploit the vast complexity and unprecedented scale of the challenges we face, not with policies but with slogans”.
Playing with paranoia “is currently the domain of populists of both left and right. But it is all too easy for elites and wider ‘respectable’ society to become infected by it. Many interests can become vested in maintaining division rather than in building community,” he said.
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“Slogans such as ‘Ireland is full’. Well, Ireland is not full. Ireland, North and South, has been right to welcome migrants and asylum seekers. In one sense, such incomers made Ireland catholic – as in universal and diverse – in a way we hadn’t been before.”
He suggested that “perhaps not enough thought was given to how to integrate those newcomers and their needs into society, and what that means for social and physical infrastructure. That oversight does not excuse us from our responsibility to seek justice for our neighbour,” he said, adding that “we are at an important moment not just in Irish or British history, but in world history. Is it to be a moment of breakdown or a moment of breakthrough?”
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