Has Unserious Ireland Decayed Enough to Drive Political Change?
Republished article for Gript.ie on the state of the Republic
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff3a482d3-7158-4fa6-abd1-c9e75e647cd3_1490x848.png)
Any attempt to narrowly pin down the essence of Irishness risks cartoonish folly. To try and explain the participatory electricity of ‘the craic’, for example, is doomed to fail. That said, there is something viscerally resonant to the essence of Irishness captured by an astute outside observer, G.K. Chesterton:
For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
Perhaps what Chesterton captures here of the Irish spirit is a joyful commitment to mortal struggle, a playful embrace of life’s long defeat. Or perhaps not and W.B. Yeats was correct in declaring that “What can be explained is not poetry.”
Yet whatever the true essence of Irishness may be, it is not explicitly taught but implicitly learned: learned from our land; learned from our use of language; learned from our shared myths and stories; learned from our music and literature; learned from our cherished sporting traditions; learned from our subtle ways of being in otherwise unremarkable situations of mundane toil; learned from our people. To know Irishness is to have knowledge by acquaintance, knowledge that cannot be described but must be met.
It is from this intangible familiarity with the people of Ireland, the people I love more than any other in much the same way as I love my family more than I love yours, that I write about our near term political future from a place of uncertainty.
Assuming World War 3 doesn’t start in the meantime thereby destabilizing (or destroying) Europe, Ireland faces local and European elections in June and, depending on how much longer the coalition is able to resist the centrifugal forces of painful incompetence and deluded disconnection which the recent referendum annihilation made clear, a general election will likely follow sometime before February. And it is while pondering these upcoming elections, the most important of my life, that I experience uncomfortable doubt.
As testified by the refreshingly anti-establishment vitality that has been channelled into grass roots organization, two groups have most felt the edge of the woke wedge in Ireland: farmers being sacrificed at the altar of Gaia under the anti-human and economically suicidal banner of “Net Zero”, and the working class communities being recklessly endangered under the banner of “international obligations”.
On the green psychosis front, given the fact Ireland emits somewhere in the region of 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while other nations with hundreds of times our population are in the process of building vast fleets of coal burning power plants, a reduction of the Irish cattle herd is about as likely to affect global weather patterns as performing a ceremonial rain dance. This is without even asking from where the global demand for beef and dairy products would alternatively be met should Irish farmers be coercively suppressed. Doomberg, the anonymous yet highly influential group of energy and finance analysts, have clearly outlined in a brief analysis why, “when it comes to climate change, Ireland is utterly irrelevant”:
“Its entire citizenry could cut their energy use to zero tomorrow and nobody would notice. . . . [T]he rest of the world would happily and quickly consume the coal, natural gas, oil, fertilizer, chemicals, plastics, and foodstuffs currently being imported into the country, and do so at an imperceptibly lower price. To believe that the number of cattle alive in Ireland somehow impacts the weather is the functional equivalent of insisting leprechauns are real.”
Irish farmers have had enough and, taking inspiration from their European counterparts, have been protesting in their tractors against such nonsensical and disastrous green policy.
On the reckless immigration front, there is much cause for common sense concern. Ireland’s population has increased 42% in three decades, with 20% now foreign born, and this startling change is bound to have been noticed. Our housing crisis and crumbling health system are being worsened by importing tens of thousands of extra people. And even if many of our relatively huge migrant intake were not mysteriously losing their documents upon arrival, or not being allowed to remain despite deportation orders, or not being bussed into secret accommodation in order to avoid local community backlash, a glaring truth remains: different cultures present different assimilation challenges. Irish people are not blind to these cultural differences. And when it comes to ease of absorption into Irish society, for example, there is an obvious difference between pro-Western Ukrainians fleeing a warzone, and low-skilled, single male, economic migrants from anti-Western cultures with very different attitudes toward physical violence, women’s rights, and democratic norms in general. “Gas the Jews” rang loud and clear outside Sydney Opera House after the rape and butchery of October 7th.
In May of 2023, a Red C poll for The Business Post found that 75% of those polled agreed with the statement “I think the number of refugees Ireland is taking in is now too many”. A lot has happened since then – including the events that preceded the Dublin riot on November 23rd. Such events included an Angolan man stabbing a tourist in September as an apparent “cry for help”; an Iraqi man sentenced in October for beheading gay men in Sligo; and a Slovakian man who had lived off welfare for ten years was sentenced in November for stabbing a female teacher 11 times in the neck. And then, on November 23rd, an Algerian previously known to Gardaí is the primary suspect in the stabbing of three children and their carer outside a school in Dublin which sparked the protest that became a riot.
On top of all this, data on immigrant origin rape and gang violence in Sweden, gang rapes in Germany, Muslim rape gangs in places like Rotherham and Rochdale, and rape and Islamist violence in France paint a grim picture. Cases like Mohamed Mohamud Mohamed, a passport destroying migrant who was refused asylum in multiple EU countries before coming to Ireland and sexually assaulting a woman in a Dublin toilet, only affirms reasonable concerns people have about immigration into Europe being 70% male.
The common sense public in Newtownmountkennedy who found out about plans to encamp 160 migrant men in a local field, and then protested this obviously worrisome imposition for weeks before being set upon by riot police as tensions rose, were not “far right” for resisting state enforced “diversity”. They are normal people who realised something stupid and dangerous was being rammed down their throats
The above is just some of the pretext to the large march against reckless immigration held in Dublin on May 6th 2024. This march involved somewhere between “several hundred” and 50,000 people, as Niamh Uí Bhrian of Gript wryly pointed out using biased establishment media coverage. And as Aris Roussinos outlined for Unherd, the march had quite the variety of anti-establishment political candidates in attendance who spoke to the assembled crowd.
Farmers and those most affected by reckless immigration are at the coalface of reality and subsequently most interested in genuine anti-establishment opposition. But when I look across the present electoral landscape, I can’t avoid the sinking feeling that the stars have yet to align.
Time will tell. But as it stands, despite green psychosis ruinously undermining farming and food security, and despite immigration worsening material conditions for all but the upper crust while Ireland becomes a more dangerous place as immigrant crime statistics from all over Europe clearly demonstrate, too many of us still appear to be too nonchalant and propagandized for the establishment blob to be electorally obliterated.
These concerns are especially felt when I see how, despite government policy obviously increasing the aforementioned evidence-based likelihood of immigrant and Islamist barbarism, many Irish people are still propagandised into scapegoating the “far right”, a group associated with only 1.9% percent of extremist arrests, as the real danger. “The influence of the far-right is growing in Ireland, a new study analysing online platforms has found.” So wrote the Irish Independent on November 20th, three days before a suspected Algerian stabbed 3 children outside a school in Dublin. The article drew on a study about the “far-right” carried out by an organisation called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). Not mentioned by the Independent is that Michael Shellenberger, Professor at the University of Austin and founder of Public, has testified to the United States House of Representatives about the ISD being part of the Censorship Industrial Complex.
“As we uncover all the elements of the Censorship Industrial Complex and observe its ongoing attempts to expand global censorship,” wrote Alex Gutentag for Public, “it appears increasingly likely that this Complex aims to undermine and denigrate populist actors and movements through allegations that anti-government sentiment is linked to hate, conspiracy theories, or Russia.” Such propaganda operations are, of course, linked to attempts to ram through totalitarian “hate speech” laws in Ireland which Helen Joyce, author and former staff writer at The Economist, has accurately described as “literally Orwellian”.
Our housing crisis, crumbling health system, green psychosis, reckless immigration, recent referendum, tyrannical “hate speech” laws, and many other issues, demonstrate that Ireland is an unserious nation run by unserious people. But just like an addict may need to hit rock bottom, I worry that conditions have still not gotten bad enough for Irish people to drive necessarily radical change.
I hope I’m wrong, but maybe things will need to get much worse for the people of Ireland before a critical mass are moved to remove the blob. Maybe we need more cause for sad songs before waging merry wars. Maybe the Irish really are “the men that God made mad”.
NOTE: This article of mine was originally published by Gript.ie on the 17th of May 2024