I think there's also a big element of the Irish far right following the Brexit and Trump playbooks and offering simplistic solutions to legitimate problems (and obviously a load of spurious nonsense too). We have a housing crisis completely of the government's making because they have refused to engage in building public housing for the last 4/5 decades for ideological reasons. The far right have latched onto this and blamed immigrants despite us still having really low population density and the government, despite what they say, are happy to let his narrative take hold so they don't take the blame.