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Thread - The Grealish remittances story is textbooks example of how far right spreads fear. They cherry-pick data & ignore warnings about inaccuracies. CSO/EU stats are better estimates but only show 20 euro a week per person to Nigeria https://twitter.com/gerardbrady100/status/1194354100042944512
The stats Grealish used come from the Nigerian government and they admit they are a wild guess based on a countries wealth and number of Nigerians living there. Our Apple inflated GNP comes into play there in inflating apparent wealth
What’s more he knew the stats he quoted were highly flawed because 4 weeks back a Dail question went into some detail on the better CSO stats https://twitter.com/gerardbrady100/status/1194355792645742592
Clearly he correctly calculated that springing his flawed big number on incompetent Leo would get widely reported on and rage shared well ahead of any correction appearing. And he was correct. This is a text book far-right method reliant on poorly informed journalists repeating
The CSO estimate of course illustrates exactly what Grealish & the racists don’t want illustrated. That Nigerians in Ireland are helping families back home in exactly the same way the Irish did in London and Boston in the 50s. Doing what they can which isn’t much but helps
A lot of us worked abroad in the past in relatively low wage jobs to bring money home, this is a familiar story that is very recognizable from there to here https://twitter.com/sineadanolan/status/1194331357918437376
The Ireland of our grandparents was dependent on remittances & parts of rural Ireland like Mayo still were into the 1960s when they were 10% of Mayo economy https://twitter.com/jlpobrien/status/1194339693644697603
The surge in racist organizing in the west is led by local elites & business figures - some of them migrants themselves from England & US. It’s a way of them preserving their power over local populations as Ireland changes in ways that reduce that power
50 years back these local business elites sent kids to the industrial schools & women to the laundries. An all powerful church kept the population in check, the Garda battered in their behalf. Those who rebeled soon had to flee or risk the above
In that context it’s no surprise that the political leadership of this racist organizing are all drawn from those who were hostile to Repeal from Kerry to Galway to Leitrim to Donegal. There constituencies voted against them except Donegal which almost did
Michael Taft has a useful blog post explaining the difference between the two numbers and pointing out what a tiny proportion of remittances go to Nigeria https://notesonthefront.typepad.com/politicaleconomy/2019/11/dog-whistling-the-data.html
But although the truth is out the damage is done with the Irish Times reporting the 3.5 billion as fact and with Newstalk shock jock Niall Boylan still reporting it as fact right at this moment on air. Some people will see articles that correct this, many won't
Just seen that it was Grealish himself who asked the Dail question on 22nd October & was told then that the CSO figure was 16 million. He's not doing any of this out of carelessness - journalists should now know to fact check him prior to publishing https://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2019-10-22a.87
Conor McCabe has an excellent thread detailing why the World Bank guess is useless and pointing out that 1060 remittances from emigrants back to Ireland were worth 260 million in today's money https://twitter.com/CMacCaba/status/1194561702987206656
Liam Hogan has done a thread on historical remittances to Ireland, in 1876 these were over 3 million dollars https://twitter.com/Limerick1914/status/1194566002853515265
