Bonus Content: Diary of a Dissenter: A Week From My Window
A little extra for midsummer — an important diary for anyone wishing to understand why Ireland appeared to go insane from about a decade ago.
Wishing Our Peace Away
SATURDAY
Regular readers will have come across my occasional bemoaning of our paucity of adequate words to describe what has been happening to us. To delve into one’s own feelings in the face of some new outrage, in an attempt to articulate them, can result more in incoherence than clarity. You find yourself writing down or uttering words like ‘insanity’ or ‘crazy’ or ‘derangement’ or ‘unhinged’, and are instantaneously aware that their effect, even on oneself, falls dramatically short of what you are trying to capture. This is probably in part because we almost always in the past have used these words in a rhetorical manner, conscious that they amounted to a poetic exaggeration of whatever it was we were trying to describe. Used, as they frequently are, to describe bizarre or outrageous behaviours, such words have acquired undertones of comedy, which is in part why they feel so inappropriate to the present situation. But they also feel feeble, as though helplessly scratching the skin and leaving the itch even worse. Even though I have lived for four decades from words, observing the events of the past decade or so, and seeking to depict in sentences what has been happening to my country, I’ve had this recurring sense that trying to describe the effects of this on my heart and my soul was like trying to get the wind in a headlock.
In an interview back in the 1990s, Vladimir Putin, then a youngish KGB officer, gave an interview in which he spoke about the terrible state of his country at the time — a time when Russia was being plundered by Western carpet-baggers in the wake of the collapse of Communism. As far as I can tell, the interview was conducted around the time he came to Moscow in 1996 to join the Yeltsin administration.
I caught a brief snatch of it recently, which for technical reasons I am unable to link, but which I found both very interesting and moving. He was talking about how he saw his role in a Russian recovery, about rebuilding the army and navy and Russia’s then floundering economy. ‘I’m with the people,’ he said, as though pointedly. And then, in reply to a question about his opinions of the state of his country, he said: ‘What can I say here? I don’t think any words would be enough. They’re difficult to pick. It makes me want to howl.’
This is how I feel when I think nowadays about Ireland: It makes me want to howl. I have not articulated it in any manner like that before, even to myself, but that would be part of the problem I suppose: We use expletives to fill the gaps between our apprehension and our articulation.
But those six words give me a sense of vindication at least of my recent suggesting that Putin may be one of the good guys. It makes me want to howl. It is not the utterance of a politician, but that of a poet, certainly an artist of some kind. You could not, for example, imagine Varadkreep or the Taoiseach mehole, or the President of All the Vaxxed, speaking in such terms — for all kinds of reasons, including that they do not love their country enough to howl at its destruction — or at all — and because they speak only in a single language: doublespeak, the language of the two-faced and fork-tongued.
Even if those who insist that Putin is a ‘player’ are correct — that he is playing a part in the WEF drama being staged to propel the takedown of the global economy so as to ‘build back better’ — which I do not believe, he is doing so in a manner as to minimise the adverse impact on his own people. Our ‘leaders’, on the other hand, act as though seeking to maximise the pain and suffering to be inflicted on their own peoples.
It will be pointed out, no doubt, that the word ‘howl’ is associated with wolves. Sure: but then I would never have put Vladimir down for a sheep, and a wolf in wolf’s clothing is better than the alternative. He may be a wolf, but he’s a Russian wolf, and that’s what the Russian people yearn for. How I wish we had an Irish wolf to lead us, or even an Irish Wolfhound.
SUNDAY
Rita and I decide to spend the day with the Yoke at the beach in Lissadell, in spite of the gloomy sky (she hates me calling it ‘the Yoke’ but nothing else seems half-right, except ‘the van’, which is prosaic in the extreme and sounds like I’m playing it down as though apologising for having it). The day was supposed to come good, though there’s not much sign; but we head off anyway with our crackers and bananas, some salad, fruit and cheese, and plenty of teabags.
Around mid-afternoon, as though in response to this act of hope, the sun sticks its head up across the bay, shines promisingly on Knocknarea and winks in our direction before making its way crawlingly across the bay.
‘Lissadell’ is one of those placenames that punctuated my childhood, usually provoked in my father when some old buddy or relation would come up from Sligo and they would spend an evening reminiscing about ‘Maugherow’ and all its mysteries, and ‘Mount Edward’, where my father and his four brothers were reared on seven acres. ‘White privilege’, you might say, if you were a Woke asshole.
Lissadell House is one of Ireland's most historic ‘stately’ homes and cultured with it, being featured in one of Yeats’s poems, In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markievicz — also known as The Light of Evening, Lissadell, its first line:
The Gore-Booth family lived in the house from the time it was built around 190 years ago. It was the childhood home of Constance Gore-Booth, who in later years, as Countess Markievicz, was closely connected with the leaders of the struggle for independence and later on became involved in the 1916 Rising, for her part in which she was sentenced to death —later commuted. Having refused to take her seat as the first woman MP at Westminster, she later sat as a member of the first Dáil.
In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markievicz was written in 1927, following the death of Constance, whose sister Eva had died the year before. Though Yeats was several years older than the sisters, he outlived both of them by more than a decade.
The Gore-Booths put Lissadell House on the market in 2003 for €4.5 million, saying they would sell it to the State for a giveaway €3 million. Predicting correctly that the philistine State would decline this unbelievably generous offer, I drew up a proposal based on the idea that some wealthy benefactor with a patriotic and constant heart might buy it and turn it into a universal university to be called The William Butler Yeats University of Lissadell. A global brand you might say. My initial target was U2, who I imagined might have a little spare cash lying around. This, to place the moment in the overall U2 story, was about midway between what I would regard as U2’s two worst albums to that point: All That You Can't Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. I was by then pretty disappointed in the band’s dogged determination to steer into the mainstream and stay there, but fancied that they were still good for an artistic comeback, and moreover still placed them on the side of the angels.
I sent my proposal to the band’s then manager, Paul McGuinness, but the house was sold before I heard back from him as follows:
‘By the time I got back from my holidays, Lissadell had been put on the market, and sold to the wealthy lawyers. Interestingly the government have now announced their intention to set up a National Trust. I'm sorry I didn't see your email at the time but I'm not great at the Internet.’
In due course, Lissadell House became mired in a legal dispute between the new owners and the local council over rights-of-way, souring the long tradition of local access and belonging — another excellent parable of ‘modern’ Ireland. Had these ‘rich lawyers’ been around in my father’s time, his childhood would have been a great deal poorer than it was.
Back in 2022, the day comes very good in the finish-up. The sun beats down and the crowd grows. About a dozen other camper vans are scattered around the grass between the road and the sand, overlooking the bay. I stand scanning the swing of the cove and imagine my father and his brothers playing and foraging here more than a century ago, at approximately the point in time where Ireland’s unfreedom morphed into freedom, for all the good it did. I wonder how he might strive to cope with being around today, with all the filth and criminality now afoot in this once almost unbearably gorgeous country, now overrun by sharks, nonces and other lowlifes.
I spread myself out at a picnic table to quell my conscience with a little tippy-tapping. I’m coming to the end of the writing of my analysis of what occurred in our legal challenge and try to imagine the conversations we might have were he still here — he who knew more about the Constitution than all the lawyers and judges in present-day Ireland put together. I have a shrewd suspicion that, without necessarily quoting Bob Dylan, he would most likely be reprimanding me for wasting my precious time casting pearls into places where thy are unlikely to impress.
The older I become, the more mysterious my father becomes to me, because he was as though of a time before his own time, when the strong gods of patriotism and honour were perhaps at their most intense in the whole of Irish history. His generation were blessed with a love for Ireland that was all but superhuman, and they acted it out in multiple ways all the days of their lives. This love was the flesh and bone of what was captured in the works of William Butler Yeats, Daniel Corkery, Seán Ó Faoláin and a handful of other great writers of those century-ago times. Now in a sense, that intense love of Ireland, which I have inherited in perhaps only slightly diluted form, is as though a curse that grips me in a time when almost nobody else gives a continental curse for Caitlín Ní Uallacháin or Róisín Dubh, or the way either of those enchanting metaphors might look at you.
MONDAY
A correspondent from the West writes with a depressing description of a ‘free speech rally’ in Galway over the weekend. Apparently there was a lot of interruption from a small group of ‘Antifa supporters’ who stood there shouting and roaring highly original slogans things like ‘Nazi scum off our streets’. The usual stuff.
This kind of thing has been happening in Ireland for several years now, a replication of a global trend whereby actual literal fascists posturing as independent traders and ‘defenders of democracy’ take to the streets in defence of government, UN and WEF policies, and seek to demonise and destroy the only true democrats left on the block. Very often they operate in tandem with the Gestapo, who keep a watching brief, supposedly to avoid trouble, but then sit snugly in their squad cars watching these slugs disrupt a genuine meeting, emerging only in the event that any of those under attack seek to defend themselves. There is only one way of dealing with this kind of thing: have a bunch of sturdy young men on hand to welcome such interlopers to the democratic party and then express dismay because they have to leave so soon. One of the things you notice from observing such people is that they are invariably cowards, who will invariably respond to a little persuasion in their own language.
Instead of this, what happened in Galway was a masterclass in the wrong approach.
My correspondent, who was a (brief) speaker at the event, relates:
‘We did try and communicate the fact that it was a free speech platform and that they were interfering with free speech. It progressed to a stage where a member of the Antifa group was told they could have their speaking time.’
This individual, a female, my correspondent relates, was ‘not Irish but American or Canadian or Australian.’ You know they type; you’ve seen her, as have I.
‘She did agree and without going into the full detail of her speech, it was a wide sweeping counter argument for all that was said. She finished her speech and then proceeded after some time to approach the stage again and interrupt the next speaker.’
What a surprise, eh? That someone who attacks a free speech rally takes advantage of a daftly generous offer to speak and then immediately begins again to harangue anyone she doesn’t agree with.
My correspondent explains that he was supposed to be the next speaker up and was going to talk about small businesses and his personal experience of the recent governmental attacks on that sector, but decided to change tack and direct his remarks at the ‘interruptors’ of the meeting. So, instead, he gave them a blast of the Hegalian dialectic and Marx’s antagonism to religion, which seems to have got the Antifa slugs even more agitated than before.
‘My speech only lasted about one minute as I was interrupted and sneered at as they stood a metre away from me. She [the American, Canadian or Australian] also indicated that my fly was undone, which it wasn't, but it was of course another disruption and distraction technique.’
After this, he says, it ‘got hostile’. Another of the scheduled speakers had launched into a pointed peroration about Stalinist atrocities, when the American, Canadian or Australian woman, and several others, took to the stage again to interrupt and shout him down.
‘My opinion at present,’ writes my correspondent, ‘is that Marxist theory is turning in on itself and can never evolve to the betterment of society but quite the opposite, with bad consequences and outcomes.’
I’d say that alright.
‘The irony of this is that the girl from Antifa has been welcomed by the Irish since she arrived a few years ago, and [yet] she feels that she has a right to suppress free speech in a country which is not even her homeland.’
‘Ironic’ is one word for it. ‘Incredible’ might be another: incredible, I mean, that a race so frequently accused of ‘intolerance’ is actually so ‘tolerant’ that this lady has not long since been on a plane back to America, Canada or Australia, but instead is given the microphone at a meeting she has try to sabotage.
This sort of thing has been happening in recent years all over the formerly free world. It’s been happening in recent days, for example, in the US, with the Steve Turley-produced documentary, The Return of The American Patriot: The Rise of Pennsylvania, the story of the American foundation-state’s fightback against Covid tyranny and the rigged election of 2020, the premiere of which has been subjected to a series of attempted ‘cancellation’ attacks which have caused its postponement several times. I haven’t yet seen the movie, but the trailer confirms what the blurb says — that it’s about ‘overcoming liberal lunacy, lies, and cancel culture’, highlighting the story of American patriots who have fought pseudo-liberal tyranny in their own state and country in the third decade of the third millennium.
Obviously, whenever and wherever this occurs, you can be virtually certain that what you are watching in action is state authorities in disguise. This is true for all Western countriesIt is vital for all Irish citizens, especially those thinking of exercising their ‘democratic’ rights, to grasp that what they are dealing with in episodes like that described above is not some random bunch of Woke activists, but the actual Irish State in all its undemocratic outrageousness.
Aside from its branding, Antifa doesn’t really exist as a ‘global entity, but might more accurately be named ‘Rentifa’: It moves its attention from territory to territory as required, hiring local thugs and wasters to carry our its dirty contracts with various governments, NGOs, et cetera. A few paid agents provocateur go in, dropsy a few twenty-spots around the place and then stand back and let it happen. Anyone daring to present a different narrative concerning political events is targetted, attacked and silenced. The braver among these agents provocateurs, like the American or Canadian or Australian ‘lady’ in Galway, sometimes get stuck in, but this is by no means obligatory. In effect, when Irish citizens encounter ‘Antifa’ on Irish streets or hotel function rooms (or, as we discovered in 2020, even on beaches), they are really, in effect, dealing with Varadkreep and the Taoiseach mehole, who give their blessing to this kind of thing, and actually pay the piper — with the tax money collected from the people who are trying to defend their democracy from obliteration. The purpose is clear: to remove any possibility of genuine opposition, and ensure that nothing is permitted that might serve to reveal the true agenda. The puppet-president of Ukraine, the unspeakable Zelensky, operates much the same kind of system, which is why our own creeps are so interested in ‘defending democracy’ in Ukraine, a country where opposition is outlawed and the governing power is essentially Nazi.
Click, click! ‘Facts, facts’, do I fancy to hear? Well, as Ian Paisley might have said, let me tell YOU: In the penultimate week of the 2020 general election, my ‘party leader’, Gemma O’Doherty, asked me to speak at a public meeting in Balbriggan, the main town in her north-Dublin constituency, one of the areas most radically transformed by the covertly orchestrated waves of immigration that have silently washed against Ireland over the past two decades. That evening provided an extraordinary catch-up on the condition of Ireland as a democracy protected by the rule of law. Approaching the venue with my wife, I was confronted by a half-masked thug (this was months before Covid) who stopped before me, moving in either direction when I tried to walk around him, then pushing his face into mine and unleashing threats, insults and expletives. I played dummy and he got bored by my refusal to ‘provoke’ him, but it was a hairy moment of a kind that was new to me after more than six decades living in this country, four of them participating in its public life.
We eventually managed to access the venue — a disused judo gym — but another speaker, the leader of the National Party, Justin Barrett, was marooned in his car outside the gate for an hour, with a mob of perhaps 70 mostly masked thugs (before Covid, mind) sitting on his bonnet and blocking his entry, while members of the Gestapo sought to implement the demands of the mob by persuading the besieged would-be speaker to skedaddle. In the end, they threatened him with arrest for ‘blocking the road’, so he drove off in disgust. We continued with our meeting, addressing about 90 of our fellow citizens who seemed as hard pressed as we were to get their heads around the idea that we were sitting at an election meeting in the Ireland we had grown up in reading incredulously of such events in foreign places. I wrote seven years ago that, after the successful dismantling of our constitutional protections for marriage, family and parenting in the ‘marriage equality’ referendum, any bunch of thugs seeking to impose its will on Irish society now had a road-tested blueprint. What I did not predict was that, in the pursuit of its agendas, such a group might in the future attract the cooperation of the Gestapo.
Yet, this new dispensation was not without its early indicators. A few years before, sometime between the 2015 and 2018 referendums, my attention was drawn to a series — about a dozen — of posts on Twitter with a theme along the lines of, ‘If you see John Waters, give him a punch from me’. Some were pseudonymous, but others made clear the identities of those making the threats. All came from the predictable LGBTBlahQ mob. They knew where I lived.
At the time, I was still somewhat naïve about a lot of this stuff, imagining I lived in a country under the rule of law. Innocently, I took a few screen-grabs and went to my local ‘police’ station to file a complaint.
After a couple of months of crickets, I received a visit from two plainclothes detectives. Nice enough lads, they understood my concerns, sympathised, agreed that this kind of thing was unacceptable. Sure these people have the run of the country now, they concurred — I was pushing an open door! However, they elaborated, there was the difficulty that the law had not ‘caught up with’ this particular form of harassment.
Oh. Was a threat of violence by identifiable individuals not simply a threat of violence? It seemed not. Not on Twitter.
Not long afterwards, I caught sight of photographs on the front of a newspaper of Garda cars painted with rainbow colours for the forthcoming Pride parade in Dublin. Ah!
This was my first indicator of something I have more recently observed in more ominous form. It conveyed that our police force has ceased to represent the entirety of the population of Ireland, evidently having been directed to extend preferential treatment to particular sectors, to the potential detriment of others. Most troubling about this kind of thing is that, on the basis of a presumption of objectivity, a police force is permitted to exercise sole use of coercive force against citizens in upholding the law. And if you are driving around in a squad car done up in the rainbow colours of a particular group of identity agitators, how neutral are you likely to be in your treatment of people who have issues with such people on account of their loutish behaviour or unreasonable demands?
TUESDAY
All this kind of stuff came down upon us in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, which left Ireland debt-ridden and demoralised in the hangover from what had briefly seemed the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger. Without knowing it, we underwent another revolution — this time a rather different kind to the one Constance Markievitz became embroiled in — a ‘colour revolution’ — a modern term meaning, in effect, a coup d’état against not so much the political establishment as the cultural value system of a society-in-time. Ukraine, for example, underwent such a revolution in 2014, though this was an actual real time coup, with full military dishonour, and implemented by genuinely ‘far right’ — i.e. literal Nazi — elements and backed by the United States, which is now defending its gains against Putin’s attempt to reverse at least some of them. Ireland’s colour revolution, by contrast, was as quiet and soft as a summer breeze, but our country was captured just as decisively.
The term ‘colour revolution’ first began to be heard about 2004, a moment that just happened to coincide with the opening of European borders, internally and — without discussion — those with the wider world. Ireland’s ‘colour revolution’ occurred roughly seven years afterwards — when an unannounced and unnoticed but inter-connected series of events was set in train with a view to turning Ireland into a left-wing — which is to say an embryonic communist — country. The explosion of NGOs that nowadays act informally, by stealth, and at the expense of the Irish taxpayer, to implement and enforce government policy in a manner as to place it beyond challenge by the public, can be traced to the years immediately afterwards. Though ‘NGO’ stands for ‘non-governmental organisation’, this does not prevent the sector being one of the biggest single draws on the public purse: Ireland currently has in excess of 33,000 NGOs, employing several hundred thousand people, at a cost to the taxpayer of in the region of €6 billion — nearly 8 per cent of the annual government budget.
In the wake of the humiliating visit of the Troika in 2010, Ireland was ripe for such a takeover, having for years hosted multiple US transnationals, including pharmaceutical companies stretching back to the 1970s. More recently, Dublin had, for tax reasons, become the European HQ of most of the American tech companies, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple. By then, mass migration into Ireland had been in train for nigh on a decade and was accelerating steadily beneath the radar of public attention.
The visits of the Queen of England and the US President Barack Obama, both in May 2011, were critical events. If you recall, on becoming US President, Obama had launched an unprecedented attack on the American Constitution, and so was a perfect ally for people with designs on ours.
Consider an odd episode that occurred in the course of that state visit by Obama, when Enda Kenny was accused of ‘plagiarising’ in his speech of welcome at Dublin’s College Green the visitor’s victory speech on his election as US president four years previously. This was much commented upon at the time, but for entirely wrong reasons. The accusation was ludicrous on its face: Kenny, or rather his speechwriter, was openly reprising Obama’s first statement as US president-in-waiting, as a nod of homage, a playful pastiche — but also, perhaps, something else. The moronic media in general decided that the issue was an attempt by Kenny to pass off Obama’s words as his own, and the usual food fight ensued.
I wrote at the time: ‘If there’s anyone out there who still thinks Ireland is a place where common sense is possible, you have had your answer. We awake to find that the raillery of our ancestors has been obliterated and everything rendered literal, leaden and clunky.‘
But let’s have a quick look at the lines that Kenny allegedly ‘stole’ from Obama.
‘If there’s anyone out there who still doubts that Ireland is a place where all things are possible’, Mr Kenny declared, ‘who still wonders if the dream of our ancestors is alive in our time; who still questions our capacity to restore ourselves, to reinvent ourselves and to prosper, well, today is your answer.’
In retrospect, this reveals itself as some kind of pointed pledge — not so much to the people of Ireland or the world in general, but to the visiting US president, seemingly ludicrously proposed as the answer to our problems. ‘We are with you’, it seemed to say. ‘We will follow.’ The reference to ‘the dream of our ancestors’ in all its non-specificity, is destroyed by the key word in the clause that follows: reinvent. What Kenny was saying, applying Obama’s words to Ireland, is: Forget all that nonsense and look where I am pointing. The last four words, directed at unspecified doubters — ‘today is you answer’ — conveys that the ‘reinvention’ will be designed, determined, and conducted not by the lights of the Irish people, still less by the ‘dreams of their ancestors’, but at the direction of the visitor and his fellow-travellers, to whom Kenny is pledging his allegiance. The sentence Kenny ‘stole’ provided a perfect camouflaged encapsulation of the paradoxical statement he was seeking to leave on the public record, and borrowing this construction of Obama’s was the perfect way of carrying it off. The controversy about his alleged ‘plagiarism’ was not unhelpful either.
The initiating event of the Irish colour revolution was accordingly Kenny’s coming to power — or rather, to office — in February of 2011. Kenny, as a politician, was utterly devoid or philosophy or principle, and therefore a perfect figurehead for the final sell-out of Ireland. The election of Michael D. Higgins as President the following November, following the shafting of the leading candidate, Seán Gallagher, by a pincer-movement of RTÉ and Sinn Féin, delivered an able accomplice who, though oozing philosophy, would finally reveal himself as equally bereft of principle. That same year also, the Irish Times appointed a new Editor, the weak, incompetent, talentless nonentity, Kevin O’Sullivan, who, like Kenny, offered outside interests a malleable instrument by which to manipulate public opinion. As with my decision to run for the Dáil a decade later, I must have had some inkling that something was seriously awry because I applied for the Editor’s job in the competition that occurred that summer, even though getting the job would have been my worst nightmare. There’s a fairly detailed account of the interview experience in my 2018 book Give Us Back the Bad Roads — and, now I think of it, the idea of a colour revolution explains pretty much all the developments I described in that book. My sole purpose in applying for the job was to alert members of the Irish Times Trust and board that the paper was losing connection with both its readers’ concerns and the country’s welfare — little suspecting that this was deliberate policy. Within three years, it was clear that the Irish Times had become the Irish Crimes.
The following year, 2012, saw the so-called Children Referendum, the first seismic hammer-blow to the Constitution of Ireland in a decade-long onslaught that was to see two further referendums within six years. The cumulative effect was to decimate the meanings of the Fundamental Rights section of the constitutional text and these assaults were followed by the Covid episode starting in 2020, which more or less finished the job off. None of this arose out of any popular desire to alter the Constitution, but from the prompting of outside interests and the covert activities of agitators now unleashed at Ireland’s throat by the subterranean colour revolution.
It is important to note that Fine Gael has dominated all governments of Ireland since 2011, certainly up to summer 2020, after which it entered a coalition with Fianna Fáil. In this period, the nature of the new dispensation remained hidden in plain sight, lightly disguised as some kind of ‘progressive’ awakening of the populace, but in reality pursuing the predatory ambitions of outsiders. By 2020, of course, the leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin (now ‘the Taoiseach mehole’), would have been made fully aware of the new facts of life, which is in part why he glided unprotesting into the role of Varadkreep’s deputy, continuing in this mode even when he technically became The Boss.
A colour revolution has five phases. The first is aimed at promulgating crisis — leveraged or contrived — in which a narrative of failure is sown, oppositional voices are attacked and marginalised, and other crises are orchestrated to maintain the pressure. Then comes the ‘chaos, confusion and fear’ stage, essentially a sustained information war, involving propaganda, demonisation of past values and alternative voices, fake whistleblowers to undermine potentially unfriendly institutions, et cetera. The third phase instils division, polarisation and demoralisation, by means of labelling, gaslighting, and partitioning of the community into different imposed mindsets, together with standard-issue insignia (masks, for example), thus sundering the citizenry one from the other and from their traditional support bases, including community and family. Next comes the apathy and disillusionment phase, in which there is a doubling-down on all the methodologies already listed, accompanied by a counterintuitive reduction in the atmosphere of crisis, because, by now, the population is well and truly divided and largely silenced. Finally comes the ‘crescendo’ stage, where a major crisis is orchestrated and extremists are let loose into the public square to accelerate the mayhem. These phases can be sequential or contemporaneous.
I believe it is possible to track these processes through the events I have listed starting with the election of Enda Kenny in 2011, right up to the triggering of the Ukraine war eleven years later. All this is of a piece. Such initiatives are always customised to the particular conditions and dynanics of the individual targetted country. My sense of things is that Ireland is on the cusp of the crescendo stage at this moment. The coming winter will see the culmination of a dozen years of plotting, scheming and undermining of constitutional and democratic structures.
This breakdown makes a lot more sense of pretty much everything that has happened in the public life of Ireland in the past decade or so, all of which otherwise seems to be mere derangement. No matter what the event or episode, you can place it on the chart. The Pantigate affair, for example, in January 2014, which launched the LGBT assault on marriage, parenthood and family — and, incidentally, essentially forced me out of journalism and public life in Ireland — might be identified as part of the second phase, the beginning of the information war, involving propaganda, demoralisation and the demonisation of alternative voices. It also throws a light on the otherwise apparently disproportionate fanaticism of many of the Woke activists we observe, who are nothing like political activists of old, but invariably often utterly demented and out of control. This is not accidental or spontaneous, but the expression of an inculcated hatred and cultivated rage, refined by intensive training and oiled with taxpayers’ money. The ideological agenda behind this — which largely exists as a contrived set of protocols to instruct and motivate the activist on the ground, has also the potential for blackmailing politicians and thus leveraging vast amounts of public money. ‘Conservative’ politicians are especially susceptible to this, being unable to respond coherently to the spurious allegations of having been involved in the maltreatment of this or that ‘minority’ in the past. All this amounts essentially to a new kind of ‘industry’, providing a raison d’etre and means of self-sustenance for hordes of ideologues and apparatchiks who might otherwise be simply anoraks of some hopeful — or hopeless — agenda.
Of course, the workability of a lot of this stuff comes down to the noxious presence of Twitter, which facilitates such toxic antics by pre-emptively intimidating the majority into a silence willingly adopted by many to avoid being daubed with the ‘far right’ paintbrush. Say, even 20 years ago, if someone had tried to label as ‘Nazis’’ and ‘fascists’ ordinary Irish people who have been known in their communities or the country-at-large for years or decades, everyone would have simply laughed in their faces. Now, though secretly aware that it’s all nonsense, they behave outwardly as though it just might be real, because the truth is no longer any defence against the klaxon of Twitter. The protective presence of Twitter is what allows clowns like Gestapo Commissioner, Drew Harris, to repeat such gibberish at every opportunity, knowing it will be picked up by the bought-and-paid-for journaliars from the Irish Crimes and RTÉ.
This, then, is why we have the sense that the world ‘went crazy’ sometime before about 2012/13. This is why nothing that has since happened in our public realm makes sense — why everything appears contradictory and tending towards meaninglessness. It was like something had occurred soundlessly and out of sight, and yet had the most profound consequences for the lives we had known and the country we had loved. It was like we were constantly under attack from some indistinctly defined force. This sense was reliable. In effect, a war had been declared and set in train and has never been concluded or called off. The force that confronted us was never merely what it seemed, but a kind of ultimate human power — as powerful as humans get to be. Those who stood before us shouting and spitting were not the true enemy, but merely hired proxies who really believed in nothing but relatively inconsequential personal gain. The governing authority was hidden behind a veil, spouting platitudes about democracy and freedom. and we were confronted by pondlife sending an entirely different message, and leaving us confounded because its venomous actions and words implied a level of conviction that somehow did not seem to be present.
There was no ‘event’ as such that we could put a finger on. In Give Us Back the Bad Roads, I postulated about a ‘moment of rupture’ that had occurred sometime before 2014, at which all previous logics and understandings had been dissolved or abandoned, and replaced by a new and utterly alien sense of what Ireland was and wished to become. This sense of things was accurate: something utterly profound had occurred, but there was no way of knowing what it was except in hindsight. Now we begin to put the pieces together. Now we know what happened to our country, in the sense that we have a name for it: ‘The Kenny/Higgins Colour Revolution of 2011’.
At least we can stop howling now and turn to face the real enemy.
WEDNESDAY
Though we have never been anywhere near sufficiently thankful for it, there is a particular treasure in the experience of anyone born in or about the Ireland of the middle of the last century that resonates more than most outsiders’ experiences with elements of the general ‘modern’ existential experience of humanity — up until now, at any rate. What I mean is that our sense of living on a ‘backward’ island — while at the same time being intimately connected to modern thought and culture — was harmonious with a more general but at the time unappreciated quality of being Antifa-free, Woke-free, corporation-free, surveillance-free, creep-free and tyranny-free. Those were really wonderful times, when we really did have ‘no enemy but time’: We put no value on it — and have since tolerated all kinds of lies being told about it — but that time in Ireland had above all the virtue that those who lived here were, for the first time in nearly a millennium, being, as the American Constitution puts it, ‘let alone’. There was no one looking for a piece of us, for pounds of our flesh.
Those two strands of ‘let-aloneness’ — in the national and existential domains — occurred more or less undetected throughout our young lives. Disastrously, we took such forms of freedom for granted. I no longer do so, though I suspect that a majority of my countrymen have still not cottoned on to the idea that something dark has been happening and that they enabled it as much as I did. The neo-colonisation of Ireland by Big This and Big That — Pharma and Tech, for a start, to say nothing of the others — is darkly piquant in having spancelled us in two ways: seizing not just our minds — as it seizes the minds of the whole world — but also our country, like a disease that attacks both the brain and the heart.
Because we are still so obsessed with portraying ourselves as a ‘self confident modern country’, we do not spend nearly enough time reflecting on the tragedy of Ireland’s not remaining a parochial and poor backwater. That condition may well have manifested certain disadvantages, but it had the advantage that, for a longish time through my lifespan to date, nobody from outside was bothered putting their eye upon us, or seeking to usurp what we possessed and loved with all our hearts.
Be careful what you wish for, as the man said. What ‘the man’ meant was not so much that your wish might come true and you will not be as happy about that as you imagine, but that your wishing it might help it come true and you would be both unhappy and remorseful in the finish-up.
When we were teenagers and Horslips were the cocks of the Irish walk and Thin Lizzy all over the UK charts, we used to mourn the fact that none of the ‘big international’ bands ever came here. I don’t think it was so much because we wanted to go and see them as that, unwittingly suffering from post-colonial inferiority complex, we took umbrage at their indifference — not so much to ourselves as to our country. (Who wanted to see Genesis anyway? We were way ahead of the coming punk revisionists who would take down ‘progressive’ rock dinosaurs.) Ireland — which meant Dublin, of course — was usually left out of the tour schedules of most of the big acts, so that, starved and insulted, we clung all the harder to Philo and Gilbert and Tony Kenny, who once had a top-three hit in the UK as ‘Kenny’, with a song called Heart of Stone. Not a lot of people still remember that.
Me, I preferred Randolph’s Tango:
We longed and craved for Ireland to be popular and cool, but it was run by hicks and squares whose dull sentences and ill-fitting suits we could not but compare unfavourably with the effervescence of the Kennedys, who luckily were Irish too. Sort of. And only ‘sort of’ lucky as well, as we had already observed but not absorbed.
Ireland then was what was generally, in the wider world, termed a ‘backwater’, a word I always found odd because it seemed to describe someplace like Venice better than an island like Ireland, which had at least managed to escape from the water. Of course, had I looked it up in a dictionary, I would have been enlightened: ‘a part of a river not reached by the current, where the water is stagnant’. That was precisely our sense of things: stagnancy. Ireland also fitted with another of the dictionary definitions of ‘backwater’: a place or situation in which no development or progress is taking place’.
The two ways of seeing things were, of course, connected. Our stagnant waters had to do with our ‘lack of development’: We did not have enough factories, or so we thought. When I was a child, the greatest dream of every small town was to have a factory, ideally run by either the Japanese or the Chinese, whom nobody could tell apart, or cared less.
These deeper themes expressed themselves for us in the paucity of rock ‘n’ roll visitors. When another tour was advertised in the NME, we would scan the list of gigs looking for ‘Dublin, The National Stadium’, and almost always draw a blank. Nobody took Ireland seriously. Nobody wanted to come here except blowhard Yanks, who demanded all kinds of modern frills and niceties, like air conditioning and indoor toilets. We sat at our wobbly desks and lamented the fact that Ireland was so unhip, so insignificant, so not cool. What sort of a God had dumped us in a dump like this?
What we did not at the time appreciate was that the word ‘backwater’ suited us also under another dictionary definition: an isolated or peaceful place. If there’s one thing youngsters absolutely do not ‘get’, it is peace. In our desire to be cool, we wished our peace away.
Now, even many who would not dare give voice to the idea would gladly return to an Ireland that was not overrun by Woke transnational corporations with their demands for ‘progressive’ developments; shrieking, blue-haired harridans as likely to be American, Canadian or Australian as Irish'; and all kinds of other indifferent aliens who look upon members of the indigenous population as though we were the interlopers and they the entitled natives. And the above explains why ‘our’ Government treats both parties as it does.