Insisting that Ireland is “not a country of hate or racism,” Taoiseach Simon Harris stressed that those who are concerned about immigration policy should be kept apart from far-right agitators, reports Breaking News.
During the Taoiseach’s speech at the Kennedy Summer School in New Ross, Co. Wexford, on Friday, Sinéad McSweeney, a global vice-president for public policy and former managing director of Twitter Ireland, conducted an interview with him.
When discussing his approach to leadership, he emphasised the significance of opposing the notion of “hopelessness”.
“I think one of the biggest risks to solving the challenges we all face is a sense of hopelessness. If we believe that something is so endemic that it can never be made better, what does that do? It allows extremism, it allows a sense of fatalism, and it also makes citizens think, ‘why bother’? One example is climate change. Of course, we all want to save our planet, to hand on our community, our earth, in a better place to our children. But sometimes people will think ‘the scale of it is so big, how can we do anything to make a difference?’ We have to push back against that,” reports Breaking News.
“Our human condition likes to know there is hope. There will be people in the audience who think ‘that’s political wiffle-waffle’. But the way you lead, you have to give people hope, because what’s the alternative? The alternative is to tell people things are terrible, and they’ll always be terrible. That’s not leadership at all,” he added, reports Breaking News.
Speaking next, Mr Harris stated that the government must address the immigration issue head-on as doing otherwise “leave it to extremists” and “creates a vacuum.”
Additionally, he denounced far-right provocateurs who have heightened hostilities at anti-immigration demonstrations throughout the nation, reports Breaking News.
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