It would be “morally dubious” to ban refugees from Ireland, Kieran Cuddihy has said. 

A Red C/Business Post found that three in four people believe Ireland has taken in too many refugees. 

Ireland is currently home to some 80,000 refugees and international protection applicants and the State is struggling to find houses for them all. 

The question of whether ‘Ireland is full’ is increasingly being debated and Kieran is clear which side he is on. 

“I don’t agree Ireland is full and I think that texter is right - we don’t have a health service that can cope and we don’t have enough housing,” he told listeners of The Hard Shoulder. 

“But those problems predate the war in Ukraine or the increase in asylum seekers in the last couple of years and they are failures of Government policy - they’re not the problem of refugees or people who are fleeing feminine or war or other such troubles most of us have no concept of or have no experience of. 

“The point I made earlier; you speak to any recruitment company in this country and they’ll tell you they spend an inordinate amount of time, at the moment, trying to get people from overseas to move to Ireland. 

“And I just think it is morally dubious to suggest that we say to someone fleeing war, ‘We don’t have room for you but the software engineer sitting on the plane beside you, they’re allowed in.’ 

“And the software engineer, they’re allowed in… and they’d be competing with Irish families for housing. 

“So, if that’s your concern, we should be banning software engineers.” 

Tánaiste Micheál Martin and protester Colm Reddy holding a placard labour policy on refugees and racism. Photo: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie

He joked, “Enough software engineers; Ireland is full of software engineers, let’s build a wall 10 feet tall and keep them out.” 

The island of Ireland has a population of close to seven million - a million fewer than there were in 1845 when the Great Famine began.