Alan Barrett
speaker
502 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard yesterday
Alan Barrett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The problem is the lack of investment.
Some people then, I think, sort of...
begin to blame or move beyond that and convince people that their problem in these areas is immigrants.
It's not.
It's the lack of investment.
Are the government dismissing... They can't allow ever more in.
The figure I was at in my head is 20% of the population were born outside of Ireland.
Well, just to, again, add the newest to what Cormac said, it is true that the population has grown and that the immigration has been a significant part of that.
But let's be clear what has happened here.
The economy has grown quite considerably over this period of time.
The needs of the economy have grown as well.
And so it wasn't so much the case that the government sat down one day and decided, oh, let's bring in more people.
We had systems in place such as, obviously, free movement between Britain and Ireland, free movement from the European Union.
And then we have a work permit and visa system as well.
And basically, as the needs expanded, more and more people did come in.
But the notion that there was some sort of a proactive policy decision that we are simply going to bring in more people, the migration system responded to the systems that were in place.
And this is only a good thing.
I live in certainly and I won't speak for any of the rest of you do we need to explain it to them a bit better than that that is only a good thing I mean just a couple of moments ago when we were talking about the you know the US involvement in the Irish economy and you know talking about tax revenues and everything like that
Like an awful lot of people working in these companies and paying taxes are immigrants.
We know all this, that if you look at our health service, our social care service, I mean, I don't know how often you're walking around Dublin, you see elderly people out on walks with carers who are clearly not Irish.
Showing 321–340 of 502 · page 17 of 26
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