Immigration Dominates the Fianna Fáil Think-In: Politics or Policy?

Kevin, is this politics or policy? Or what's behind this?

It's strange that the Fianna Fáil thinking has been overtaken by this amidst a lot of talk about cost of living and budget in a few weeks.

Immigration is a topic that is still very much, I think, in voters' minds, but it hasn't been top of the agenda for quite some time now between fuel protests and the cost of living, housing, and even a bit of Donald Trump on the side.

So it hasn't really been a big topic, but it's coming to Cabinet this week, so it's either by fluke that this is what Fianna Fáil have ended up talking about these two days, or by design.

I struggle to believe that Micheál Martin decided Jim O'Callaghan was the guy he wanted to land at the top of every news bulletin.

I was about to suggest, because

there's multiple angles that we could discuss in all of this, and one of them is Jim O'Callaghan's sudden prominence in the middle of all of this.

You don't think it's necessarily by design, from what I've heard.

Well, I don't think it's by Micheál

Martin's design anyway, but maybe it's by someone else's design.

But look, it's also, I think, what's been announced today, if we were talking about it, Gavin, three, four, five years ago, would have been very controversial.

I think there would have been a lot of debate around it.

I think it would have taken up possibly a lot more airtime and a bit of fraction between parties.

Now it seems to be kind of not even radical.

It seems to kind of be accepted that you're tightening up the rules.

And so in some ways, maybe it's a popular move.

I think it probably is.

Whether it's popular or not, we might see in a couple of days time.

But Gary Murphy, one thing which strikes me and Kevin's alluded to it there, the reason why this has kind of captured the imagination is that it wasn't really seen coming, that there wasn't much of a trailing of this.

People thought, yes, it's the Fianna Fáil thinking.

Of course, they're going to be thinking at the budget.

It's all going to be of a cost of living.

Suddenly, this other news drops out of the heavens.

And because it wasn't seen coming, everyone's a little bewildered by it.

It was raised in the Sunday Times the week before last by Colin Brophy, the Fine Gael junior minister, in an interview with Jennifer Bray, I think.