Father of the Nation, speak!
In view of the moral collapse of the Oireachtas, and the Presidency in the time of Higgins, Michael McDowell now stands as the de facto moral leader of the Irish political domain.
Whistling On The Titanic
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As someone who avoids the Irish Times as though it were a plague-peddler, I depend on others to tell me when it publishes something interesting (rare) or particularly egregious (common), and it was in this way that I learned it had published a strange article by Michael McDowell on New Year’s Day. McDowell, it may be recalled, is the onetime left-righter (left-wing on social issues, right-wing on economics) who in recent years has turned into a fountainhead of common sense, confronting the Irish government on such as its migration policies and ‘hate speech’ laws.
The article is headlined — provocatively, you might say: ‘Ireland in the 1980s was backward, poor and stagnant. Some politicians want to bring us back there’.
It is a strange article because, whereas its headline suggests it to be some kind of sociological and/or cultural critique, it is a rather bland reiteration of economistic quasi-factoids concerning matters which would, at the time they refer to, have been questionable as to their accuracy or meanings, and which are now beyond investigation or relevance other than in a kind of frank and open discussion that is now publicly impossible, this being one of the first and foremost reasons why his headline’s broad assertion is comprehensively misleading. The headline peddles a familiar trope from the time it refers to and from some time before and afterwards: the denigration of times past in order to elevate the present and deter any close scrutiny of its faults.
The first Twitter comment on the article is from a`Matt Malone’ who, responding to the sentiment of the headline rather than the article underneath it, writes:
I was born in the 1980s and lived in Dublin my whole life and this is honestly the worst Dublin has been in my lifetime. The city centre is a very dangerous place, there is murders on the news everyday now! Remember when murders were super rare and not commonplace? Its unrecognisable.
As though instantly, Michael McDowell (for it is he) responds:
Agree on that. MMcD.
Malone’s comment is the first of hundreds saying more or less the same thing: (Summary:) Speak for yourelf, Michael, the 1980s was a far better time, without ‘Islamic head-choppers, granny rapists, Islamic child rape gangs or child stabbers’, we were poor for sure but Ireland was not as horrible as today.
Actually, in fairness to McDowell, he makes these comments available on his Twitter feed, even though the Irish Times version makes them available only to paying customers, a shrinking community these days.
Perhaps its author, cast by hippocampus damage back to his early days in politics, initially intended the article as a kind of non-sequitur reprise of his own early chart-topper argument about nasty lefties hiding in the long grass to drag Ireland down — this time from its ranking as ‘wealthiest country in the world’, or whatever version of that fiction is favoured right now. And perhaps some not-yet-comatose sub-editor in the Irish Times decided to spice things up a little by adding a little sociological Huy Fong Sriracha. The strange thing, though, is that McDowell — if he did not write the headline himself — retained it in the version of the article published on his website, indicating that he approved of the spin and of the rather provocative logic it imposed on his otherwise pedestrian ruminations.
This is strange and interesting, not least because of the time-warped nature of the exercise in the context of McDowell’s recent outing as a born-again 'far righter’ on the issues underlying last year’s referendums on family issues and, more or less contemporaneously, the so-far unsuccessful attempt by the government (largely thanks to our hero) to introduce discourse-chilling ‘hate speech’ laws. This article has him — ostensibly, at least — reverting to his prior demeanour as a neoliberal street-fighter — and just in time for the Seanad elections, in which voting closes on January 29th, at 11am. As he urges us not to go back to the 1980s, Mr McDowell has contrived to return there himself.
It would be easy to ignore McDowell’s article completely, since it is, in its body, so insubstantial and non-eventful. The reason we should pay attention to it, however, relates to what it adds to the already ambiguous demeanour and stance(s) of its author, who might well be Ireland’s political saviour, but on the other hand might not.
It starts off in the manner of a very bad circa 1991 Inter Cert ‘composition’ on a topic along the lines of ‘Life before Ireland got rich’, remarking on what is implied as some kind of mystery between Ireland’s joining the European Economic Community in 1973 and being ‘in the throes of despair’ for the decade immediately afterwards. This is wrong to begin. Not only were the 1970s in Ireland a better and more hopeful time than the present, they were, in certain senses, more hopeful than even the 1980s. This is because, in the wake of the Lemass boom of the late 1960s, Ireland was for the first time in 125 years showing signs of being able to hold on to its young. Emigration had ceased. There was an explosion of popular culture, political dissent under multiple headings, and imported consciousness of an overwhelmingly leftist, though — it seemed — fairly harmless inclination. Michael McDowell may well have bemoaned those developments, as indeed would I with the hindsight of 2025, but at the time they seemed like necessary explosions of longing and alertness, and were welcomed by youngsters such as we were at the time.
Sure enough, McDowell’s main gripe here emerges as ‘how dominant the State had become in the failing Irish economy’, which he says ‘most young people nowadays would hardly believe’. He goes on briefly to describe the effects on the indigenous industrial sector in which ‘nearly everything of big economic significance [he lists the national airline, shipping lines, ports, internal transport, mail and parcel delivery services, phone services, energy production, banking and life assurance, health insurance, broadcasting, steel manufacture, sugar and fertiliser manufacture, and processed food production] was controlled and owned by ministers or State agencies under their departmental control.’
He goes on to outline the deleterious effects of all this on budgetary policy, state investment and, with particular emphasis, taxation rates, which went from 26 per cent at the lower levels of income to 60 per cent at the highest.
He then lists some of the downstream effects of these conditions, including increasing tax evasion and the rise of a black economy. Is he even serious? In a country living entirely for the past three decades off the immoral earnings arising from the run-off from the international financial roulette table, is he really suggesting that we should thank our lucky stars that nixers are nowadays harder to pull? Who is this guy and whom does he speak for?
He continues:
In a new wave, gross emigration in the 1980s was 450,000. Unemployment rates fluctuated between 13 per cent and 18 per cent in the same decade. The undocumented Irish in the US are a reminder today of that era. Industrial unrest was widespread and crippling, featuring occasional ESB strikes with blackouts, postal strikes, rail and bus strikes, bin strikes and bank strikes. Interest groups often prevented inevitable sectoral reforms such as liberalising the taxi business or allowing the emergence of cafe bars.
Taxis?
Café bars?
Yes, a new wave of emigration did indeed start up, in the main because of the failure of the main political parties (including his own at the time, which was Fine Gael) to build coherenctly on the foundations laid down by Lemmas/T.K. Whitaker, the architects of the 1960s boom.
Does he really think that dusting down his old café bar hobby horse is going to have any traction with people whose children are today living in Canada and Australia while their streets are swarming with Africans and Romanian gypsies?
As for liberalising the taxi business, well that finally arrived, and now, as a result, a friend told me the other day that, arriving late into Shannon one night post Christmas, and requiring a taxi to get home, he was quoted a price of €300 to take him to Galway.
He even drags out the old canard about the bad roads. I swear. Not even the author of Give Us Back the Bad Roads could make it up:
Today’s younger generation never experienced and cannot imagine such a society — but it was our reality in the 1980s. The contrast between the Republic’s awful road system and that in Northern Ireland was colossal. Today the opposite is the case.
Read my book, Michael.
Reading this article now, in our present circumstances, is to shiver in bemusement. At a time when young Irish people on virtually any income you might name are unable to afford a home in their own country, which regardless is being flooded with alien spongers who are given free homes by the government as quickly as it can build or find them, one of our most senior politicians finds fault with a decade when you could buy a grand house for double your annual salary! Meanwhile, would-be Irish emigrants are beseeching visas from the governments of Canada and Australia to enable them do exactly what those 450,000 did in the 1980s, and this time with zero prospect of ever coming back, or — if they do — finding their homeland a place they would wish to put their heads down in.
Sure, back in the time before the Progressive Democrats came and went, we would all have liked a few more quid in our pockets, but is he really suggesting that this was worse than having your country swamped with hostile interlopers without a by-your-leave from the supposedly sovereign people?
Then he comes to his punchline:
Ireland, in short, was backward, poor and stagnant, locked in a slow-burning social and economic crisis.
The content here is a little more self-evidently economistic, and yet the choice of words is strange, as though a couple of Michael’s old neuroses are being taken for a stroll.
Then it gets surreal, suggesting that this article may have been written in, say, December 1994 or 2004 rather than, presumably, the dying days of December 2024:
Those who challenged the existing consensus were routinely condemned as Thatcherite by commentators and union leaders who were comfortable with the failed status quo.
Imagine writing a sentence like that after a decade of ruthless and relentless cancel culture! How far removed from the reality of the present would you need to have become?
He continues:
They feared competition — even regulated competition, and even opposed having tax rates reduced to 20 per cent and 40 per cent, and they stridently demanded retention of State enterprises and monopolies.
Let me tell you something, a Mhiceál: for the past decade, I and anyone else who questioned the diktats of government have been called much worse than ‘Thatcherite’. In addition, we have had our livelihoods destroyed, been banished from public discourse and ridiculed by every two-bit disc-jockey on the thoroughly legalised and State-purchased Irish airwaves. Competition has become the least of our worries, but even so I would direct you to a real problem in the malfunctioning and possible corruption of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), should you care to investigate it, something I suspect you may already be aware of.
Senator McDowell concludes:
Our problems at the dawn of 2025 are very real — but very different from the dark past we left behind.
Frankly, this, as well as the rest of the article, is utter nonsense, but also somewhat mystifying as to why it was published at all. And why now, at a time when these ‘very real problems’ of the present are reaching a crescendo of doom? Towards whom is it aimed? Voters among the ‘educated unintelligent’ graduates of the National University of Ireland who are as much in denial about the true state of our country as the article suggests its author to be?
The reference to ‘some politicians who want to take us back there’ reveals itself in the end to refer to those ‘politicians on the left who want to re-establish the State-dominated economy that failed us so badly’ seems to be no more than an idle sideswipe at elements in the parliamentary system with close to zero chance of gaining power in any foreseeable context, who represent nothing like the threat now presented to this country and its people by the two major parties about to re-enter government together. In any event, those ‘politicians on the left’ certainly do not wish to ‘bring us back’ to the 1980s or any other past time, except perhaps Petrograd 1917 to hold a Pride parade.
The ‘take us back there’ reference is the invocation (here, as I say, presumably the contribution of an Irish Times sub-editor) of an old trope by which all criticism of what was and is termed ‘progress’ was stifled for decades, leading inexorably to the disaster we now contemplate. Derision and distortion of past facts and realities was a constant feature of attempts during the post-1980s period to propel Ireland into undoing its nature, character and belief systems, the classic case being the legend of Eamon de Valera’s 1943 speech about the pursuit of an idealised material existence in Ireland, widely and wildly caricatured as his ‘comely maidens dancing at the crossroads’ speech, which inconveniently contained no mention of either crossroads or dancing, and did not include any use of, or variation upon, the word ‘maidens’.
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Does it really matter what Michael McDowell has to say about anything, germane or otherwise of it to our present situation? He is after all, just an outgoing member of Seanad Éireann, seeking re-election, and likely facing something of a dogfight for his share of that ‘liberal’ vote. Does it even matter whether Michael McDowell gets re-elected to the Seanad? I would like it to matter a great deal, but I haven’t been as confident as I would like to be that he will continue last year’s bout of excellent oppositional leadership — and his New Year’s Day article makes me more unsure rather than reassured.
The reason is that Michael McDowell is not simply a former Tánaiste, Minister for Justice and Attorney General (all devalued offices these days) but has actually been a political titan at the heart of Irish public life for close on forty years. In the course of that time, he evolved from a narrow-casting liberal (economic and, within a narrow definition, social) to a figure of significant heft and appeal to the country-at-large. The reasons for this are complex, but the reality of it cannot be denied.
McDowell remains, on paper, the best internal hope we have of rescuing our country from the evil now consuming it. I’m don’t know if he is himself aware of this circumstance, or even the scale of that evil, but if not he needs to catch on and catch up real fast. This is life-or-death for our nation and its homeland. The elections of 2024 showed that the People of Ireland are either insufficiently aware of what is happening, or all too aware that the Resistance is incapable of making anything better. If that was their conclusion, I am not about to quarrel with them.
Michael McDowell has shown a partial and intermittent understanding of what is awry and what is required. His interventions under various headings have been impressive, but his reach and scope have been far more limited than they need to become. Intermittently in the past few years — mostly in my weekly diary here on Unchained — I have expressed high hopes for him, even proposing him as our most eligible Taoiseach-by-acclaim in the wake of an as yet unscheduled Velvet Revolution. I continue to believe he has such potential, but he needs to drop the aura of normalisation he surrounds himself with most of the time, for these are not normal times. To be honest, I am today less certain that he is the right man, for his New Year’s Day article, at best a form of whistling in the tilting deck of the Titanic, is ominous as to both his grasp of the gravity of our situation and his seriousness of purpose in addressing it. But perhaps this still remains to be tested and observed in conditions where some such intervention stands to become utterly and unambiguously essential.
Let us deal first of all with the central comparison made explicit in the headline of that article of McDowell’s. The very proposition that there is some actual meaningful comparison to be made between the Ireland of the 1980s and the hellhole that is Ireland 2025 is itself risible on its face. In actual fact, the 1980s were not just ‘better’ than the present; they were the very inversion of the present, its antithesis, antidote, antipode, converse, obverse, inversion, reversal, opposure and flip side. As I have stated many times in the past decade, we have slipped backwards in time, not merely from the instant moment at any given calendar timeline, but from the very epoch we had arrived to, in which Western civilisation was promising to consolidate itself to become the most effective democratic system in human history. All gone now, it’s with O’Leary and Yeats and de Valera in the grave. In recent years, we have spun wildly out of control and are currently careering back to the dark ages, into a future of neanderthal religiosity, neo-feudalism and digital totalitarianism. This is what makes reheated critiques of 1980s social democracy so absurd.
Clearly, the vast majority of the commenters who responded to McDowell’s article understand this implicitly.
The relative merits of, say, 1985 and 2025 is not an argument that we should waste much time or space with, but an outline sketch is here called for.
In the first place, we need to get out of the way the idea that there is any absolute case to be made between prosperity and human happiness. This argument was mooted and placed in question by Eamon de Valera in 1943, and disposed of by Richard Easterlin in 1974, when he showed by his ‘Easterlin Paradox’ that the relationship between wealth and happiness, whether of nations or individuals, occurs in approximate parallel up to the point where basic needs are met, and after that diverges in a manner demonstrating that increasing income does not lead to a corresponding increase in happiness. The premise of the implied connection made in McDowell’s article and its headline — that there is some inevitable and established correspondence between lack of money and ‘backwardness’/‘stagnation’, and by extension between wealth and enlightenment/dynamism — is relevant only while subsistence itself is under threat, which it was not in the 1980s, despite the scarcity of money. The quality of life in Ireland or elsewhere in the 1980s cannot therefore be measured by economistic metrics alone, and to the extent that these rubrics are relevant, it needs to be said that, even in material terms, the 1980s were a better time for the people of this country, because the wealth measured by such metrics as GDP and GNP was at least dedicated to the benefit of the indigenous population of Ireland, rather than to the project of replacing it with imported outsiders. There was emigration in the 1980s, to be sure; but there is emigration now also, despite Ireland being heralded as ‘one of the richest countries in the world’, and this time it is likely to be terminal.
Over the past four years of our National Passion, I have repeatedly essayed a comparison between the present decade and the 1980s, to the implied detriment of the former (which is to say the present), notwithstanding all the talk about ‘progress’ to which we have been subjected in the current decade and the ones before. My point is that, in all the things that matter, life in Ireland was infinitely better then than it is now. It was happier, smarter, brighter, friendlier, cleaner, more decent and wholesome, more creative, freer in just about any way you can imagine that is not fixated on filth or ideology. This is not ‘nostalgia,’ but a clear-headed retrospection, based on certain markers of memory in my own life, and their Proustian undertones, and in the life of my country when it was undeniably that: my country.
In setting out such a comparison by way of the Case for the Prosecution, I imaginatively survey two sample years, plucked from those two sample decades, separated from one another by half a human lifetime. Let us compare, for example, last year, 2024, with a ‘middle year; of the 1980s, the iconic 1984, made legendary by George Orwell who rendered its numerals synonymous with totalitarianism. But here is the clanging irony: of the two, last year, 2024, was the one deserving of being termed the tyrannical one, the one in which the public life of the world had been stripped of all human tenderness, this having been replaced with an ersatz compassion rooted in a fiendish, murderous and grasping ideology of plunder and human destruction. 2024 felt as though it had slipped backwards in time, as though seeking out the Middle Ages of baneful legend, and be reconciled with its pre-civilisational bedfellows.
When I hark back to (the real) 1984, I enter not so much memories as feelings. The overwhelming sense I have is of a moment of expectation. It is a strange thing, but the celebrations we engaged in that year on account of Orwell and his book were exuberant and ebullient precisely because we felt certain that nothing of that which Orwell had imagined could ever dampen our ardour for life and the future, both guaranteed by the escalating scent of freedom and possibility.
In a strange dissonance, the public events of that year — dark or light of them — are of little or no help to me in connecting with those feelings and rendering them present. That was the year that Ronald Reagan came to Ballyporeen, the alleged home of his ancestors, and met with a mixed reception. I am there in the moment on Eyre Square in Galway, when his eyes connected with mine over my clenched fist, as his car swept through. This was the 500th birthday of our Western capital, a town we adored more than any place on Earth, now reduced to a ghetto teeming with hostile outsiders. 1984 was also the year of the UVF’s attempted assassination of Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, whom I’d interviewed for Hot Press in his lair in West Belfast the year before. It was also to be the year that the Irish State released Nicky Kelly, wrongfully convicted of participation in a train robbery. In November, as I was interviewing Charles Haughey in his office in Leinster House, we heard of Margaret Thatcher’s since infamous ‘Out, out, out!’ rejection of the report of the New Ireland Forum. Politically, sociologically, a varied but overall uninteresting year, and yet a year which would stay with me for the rest of my days as the one in which I began to feel that just about everything good and positive was at last possible for my dear land.
The main focus of my remembering has to do with trying to put flesh on memories that are overwhelmingly positive in a way that, when I look around me today, fills me with nostalgia and grief. I am unsure whether I can adequately reconstruct those times now, but the intensity of the feelings that recur to me is utterly consistent, and occasionally overpowering.
Meditating on these two dates, the year just finished and its iconic antecedent of four decades ago, I am moved to make an adjustment. Something is wrong with the arrangement or chronology, one in the receding past, disparaged and defamed by presentism, hubris and dystopian prophecy, the other close enough to be still the present — tyrannised, propagandised, gaslit, devoid of meaningful culture or conversation, sorrowful. What can it all signify? Then it strikes me again: They are in the wrong order of ‘progress'. If a Man from Mars, shown some clips from the two years and perhaps some writings by way of evidence, were asked to undertake a brief stab at a comparison between their qualities with a view to pronouncing one or other the more advanced, hospitable, open, interesting and vibrant — and accounting for everything aside from fortunes defined economically — he would undoubtedly elect 1984 as by far the more enviable year, and accordingly the obvious choice to be, paradoxically, the more ‘progressive; and ‘modern’ year. By rights, had progressivism been a true thing, we should by now have arrived in Ireland 1984.
In the 1980s, because nobody had much in the way of folding currency, life seemed to organise itself so that you didn't need to pay for things. Entertainment, for example, was provided by politicians, who regarded the creation of interesting storylines as their most fundamental responsibility — much more, certainly, than long-term planning or fiscal responsibility. This was a time when, every morning when you switched on the radio, some new crisis would have descended on the body politic. This was the time of GUBU, of tapped media telephones and strange coincidences involving wanted criminals overnighting in the homes of senior members of government. But it was also a time when our political leaders were not trying to kill us or our children with poison injections. There was corruption, too, but on a small and relatively harmless scale compared to today, when vast amounts of fake money are being pumped through the Irish economy with a view to ultimately asset-stripping our country by leveraging the debts thus accumulated, and we lock people up for declining to pretend that a girl is not a girl, or a boy a boy.
And there was back then an oppositional press to call out malefactors and chancers when they manifested. For a small country, we had a remarkably varied and democracy-enhancing press, with critical and contrary positions being offered in ‘alternative’ publications like Magill, Hibernia, In Dublin and Hot Press. At the time, of course, these magazines were all left-leaning, and in a context where the overwhelming effect of the mainstream was to the contrary, this seemed to be right and proper, for they also served to defend our freedom, now fading fast. Moreover, Magill, in particular — the creation of the ‘mercurial’ Vincent Browne, was a publication with strong ethical boundaries and decent writing. Our mainstream press made up for what it lacked in vibrancy by being honest and diligent, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. Compare this to 2025, where every newspaper is just a different masthead on the same old state-funded propaganda, and the role of the ‘national’ broadcaster seems to be the belittling of everything national, native and natural. The ‘pirate’ radio stations referred to somewhat disparagingly by Michael McDowell were actually infinitely better than the legalised stations that followed after 1989, genuinely varied in both musical and speech content, and utterly removed from the control of nefarious interests. Pirate radio was the zenith of independent radio in Ireland. I know, I was there for it. Its ‘regularisation’ was one of the worst things that ever happened in the media of our country, delivering us to the stinking embrace of twisted hack-jocks with their bought and paid for Woke-or-croak platter-patter.
Through the 1980s, we had the best broadcaster in the world on our airwaves every weekday morning. Gaybo was an opaque and ambiguous figure, the kind of broadcaster who allowed for a leavening of any singular theme or direction. Just as he was to the fore in pushing ‘modern’ ideas, he was even-handed in his willingness to delve into deeper themes of draining spirituality and associated matters. On air, he was a true star, a fabulous broadcaster provided he had a good script in front of him. He had no agenda, but just wanted good shows that would be the talk of the country for at least a week. On radio, he wanted people to stop their cars at the side of the road and listen, which they often did.
Culturally, the 1980s was light years removed from the mediocrity of 2024/5. That was the decade Riverdance reinvented not just Irish dance but also Irish pride and imagining as to the possibilities that might reside in things we had overlooked or disparaged. The 1980s, remember too, afforded us the opportunity to observe U2 cut a swathe through the international musical imagination, and watch Jack Charlton's charges achieve a succession of scoreless draws with anyone willing to have their shins kicked for an afternoon..
Ireland was defined by its personality and its people’s sense of their unquestionable proprietorship, as guaranteed in the 1916 Proclamation. It was a fun and easy place to live a life not defined by what you possessed, but on account of your place in the Irish tribe, which was garrulous and mordant and ironic. Compare that to the muted and lockjawed hordes of the broken after fifteen years of pummelling by the LGBTQP goons, the NGO grifters and other alphabetised evildoers. Above all, there was an immense sense of possibility — the feeling that the future was ours to create, and could become whatever we wanted it to. At the time, we had no foreign occupiers or corporate overlords to answer to. To be Irish then was something noble and fun; now it is to be insulted and humiliated by those we trusted to manage our national affairs.
The 1980s was by far the most vibrant and promising decade of my lifetime. I remember, just by way of example, the spirit of Lisdoonvarna, our most prodigious music festival of the early 1980s, which captured the spirt of our people in that time — life-embracing, joyous, and freedom-loving, the same implicit sense of Ireland as a unique culture in the world, something worth loving and preserving but now shattered and scattered to the four winds. In the summer of 1982, at a fundraiser for the by then financially struggling Hot Press, I found myself standing in a crowded marquee drinking pints of lager with Rory, Philo (Lynott, to rhyme with ‘why not?’) and Paul Brady, with whom I recall falling into a rather heated argument on account, as I remember, of my regarding some of his songs more highly than he did. Give me the names of their three equivalents in 2025!
I also got to see some of the best concerts I’ve ever been to — Tom Waits in Leisureland, Galway, in mid-1981; De Danann on the beach in Salthill one glorious summer’s day in 1982; Roxy Music that same year at the RDS.
The early 1980s was a kind of Shangri-la, in large part due to the post-Lemass population explosion which was largely unique to Ireland. Now, our hospitals turned into slaughterhouses, we kill 10,000 of our people before they can draw their first breath and the government sits around dreaming up ways to bully the old ones into early graves.
Sure, the economic situation was abysmal, mainly on account of deficit budgeting, deficient analysis of the underlying conditions, political infighting leading to instability, and — yes, McDowell is right on this score — punitive taxation. But the objective state of the country did not reflect this in anything like the manner implied by McDowell. Dublin, for example, was a beautiful city to visit and live in. It was overwhelmingly safe and friendly, in contrast to today when it seems like a foreign city to more and more of our indigenous people. It’s nightlife and public houses were abundant and legendary. Irish music artists were conquering the world. We had an enduringly rich literary tradition, especially in the theatre, with Tom Murphy and Brian Friel at the height of their powers, with John Banville and John McGahern holding our own in the novel-writing Olympics.
It has become a journalistic convention, when treating of the 1980s, to list several constantly revived and emphasised episodes as though they summoned up the totality of the decade, these being in particular the stories of three women, Joanne Hayes, wrongly accused of child murder in the Kerry Babies saga, Ann Lovett who died in childbirth in the Granard episode, Eileen Flynn in Wexford, dismissed in 1982 for cohabiting with a married man.
Of course all the events actually occurred. The problem resides not in recalling them but in deciding that they are in some way representative of something other than themselves. Each in its way expressed something about the culture in its moment. But they did not, either individually or cumulatively, summon up some deeper truth about the Ireland of that time. Terrible and ridiculous things happened all the time in the 1980s; they’re still happening, and now they’re being covered up, not subject to minute media investigation and discussion.
It is in the nature of media in the modern era to purport to present the essences of reality, but they do nothing of the kind, What they present is an ideological version of reality, placing emphases on certain aspects and not on others. Although I was not working in the mainstream media in the 1980s, I could instance multiple episodes from my own later working experience which I might have proffered as being of equal social and cultural significance to Granard, the Kerry Babies or Eileen Flynn, but which were studiedly ignored by the majority of Irish media. In 2010, by way of a random example, I published a story in my Irish Times column of a young man and woman who had become involved in a relationship and had a child, before discovering that they were actually half-siblings. This had arisen from the casual brutality of the family court system, which had many years before banished the young man’s father from his life, so that he completely lost contact with his son, who was raised by his mother and another man. The story was picked up by the Daily Mail and ended up being front page news in numerous countries around the world — almost everywhere except Ireland, in fact. If Ireland was an honest and fair country, ‘John and Sarah’ (not their real names) would today be listed alongside Joanne Hayes, Eileen Flynn and Ann Lovett as examples of social dereliction, but they are not and never will be until we tackle and root out the ideological partisanship and rottenness which have brought Ireland to her knees.
Much of the public commentary of the past 35 years has been directed at discrediting and demonising the middle-distant past, which is essentially to say the years between Independence and the death of de Valera — say, the half-century between the late 1920s and the late 1980s. In a broad-sweep kind of way, this is a period nowadays grotesquely and falsely smeared as backward, ignorant, priest-ridden, obscurantist and reactionary. In truth, it was a time when money was scarce, but sense and decency were commonplace. We do not have a name for the 35-year period that followed, the one that began with the arrival of transnational pharmaceutical companies, the early twitches of the Celtic Tiger, the invasion of Big Tech, and the onset of early waves of mass inward migration — mostly scammers — from the early 1990s onward, and is not set to terminate in the abolition of Ireland qua Ireland.
If we step back from this epoch, even as we stand at its tail-end, it is interesting to identify a number of keynotes, which I would identify as including the emergence of the following as virtually national hallmarks: vulgarity as a form of virtue, boorishness as a badge of honour, cynicism as a sign of intelligence, lying as a means of livelihood, mediocrity as an overarching order-of-merit, and by force when all else fails. In other words, from about the end of the 1980s, there began to emerge the earliest signs of what we now recognise as a collective moral inversion, or the beginnings of the elimination of ‘the Good’ — the aspiring to higher values and virtues, which had characterised Irish culture for several centuries, and through the darkest times imaginable. Here it is necessary to insinuate a standard and all but mandatory caveat: that this prior Ireland was ‘by no means perfect,’ that there were shortcomings and dark patches in the weave of Irish life, blah blah. Yes, but — let me tell you most forcibly — it was nothing remotely like what is now emerging, when Ireland slaughters its young in the womb and imports the dregs of the Third World as ‘replacements,’ when unidentifiable rapists and killers stalk the streets with virtual impunity, when the old die alone for the good of their health, and the Irish people are treated by their elected ‘representatives’ as strangers in their own dear but dying country.
With hindsight, this arriviste culture can be seen to have rolled out since the election of Mary Robinson in 1990, and the ascendancy of those who supported her — chiefly leftists, radical feminists, and sundry fringe radicals, accompanied and supported by the escalating wave of a new pop culture, which started out as a beleaguered fringe of not inconsiderable quality, but soon turned into a tsunami of mediocrity and pretence. Although there were some occasional instances of exceptionalism or aberration within the general picture, the way to get on in this new culture was to decry the past and all belonging to it, and especially values relating to religion, nation and family as traditionally understood. Occasionally, in the beginning, individual voices might deviate from one or other of these mandates, but in general such excursions were severely punished, and gradually began to phase themselves out. Political correctness became a kind of cultural constitution of this new regimen, as did the talking up of new, positive-sounding ‘values’ like ‘equality,’ ‘pluralism,’ ‘tolerance,’ and ‘diversity.’
Again, in retrospect it is possible to observe with some clarity that the hidden intention behind what was, without doubt, a deliberately orchestrated shift of cultural emphases was to dethrone intelligence, wisdom, experience and memory as the guiding qualities of Ireland’s public life. Within a few years, Ireland went from being a country that pretty much good-naturedly ignored the voices of its young to one which excoriated and marginalised those of its mature citizens, especially those who were still prepared genuinely to extol the virtues and values of the past.
If you think of 1980s Ireland as a novel, it would be an ironic, magic-realist epic, full of implausible characters and the oddest shifts of plot, a strange and stylish intermix of politics and the personal, in the style of Ian McEwan or Milan Kundera. The Naughties, by contrast, would be a frenetically-plotted airport thriller with one-dimensional characters and three or four dirty bits, a numbing nothing for the hyperactive, in the style of Cecilia Ahern or Sally Rooney. This state of affairs might be deemed to have continued until the financial meltdown of 2008, after which things started to unravel in a radical way, coinciding with the onset of misery lit. From 2011 and the Irish autogolpe, Ireland might well have been the creation of Michel Houellebecq, with its plummeting into unabashed filth-seeking and perversion, accompanied by a growing sense that life has no meaning. Since 2020, of course, it’s Orwell all the way.
I may have mentioned once or twice that Michael McDowell and I have not always seen eye-to-eye. We got off on the wrong foot, perhaps 35 years ago, when a pretty flattering profile of him by me for the Sindo was festooned with a headline referring to him as ‘a bootboy of the Right.’ In the interim, we have banged off one another in public more than a couple of times, about family law (on which he was inclined to protect his vested interest) and suchlike. I admit I have enjoyed baiting him, and he always rises to it, giving back at least as good as he’s got. But all this is mere playacting when you stand back and realise that, by a process of osmosis, Michael McDowell has risen to become the Elder Lemon of Irish public life, and, moreover, continues to rise to the occasion of that sacred responsibility as no one else betrays the slightest intimation of doing.
McDowell is himself a kind of refugee — cast hither from a bygone age when politics was a serious business whose purpose was not to delude and confuse or gaslight but to curate the People’s inheritance of institution, charter, statute and coin. He is of a different breed to what is going now in the political system of this island, peopled mostly by liars, fraudsters, grifters, scammers, ponces, scumbags, maggots, cheap lousy faggots (© Shane MacGowan, so don’t blame me!) and hypocritical bullies. The day may come when the most sensible thing to do, in a last desperate attempt to prevent our country being swallowed up by the waves, will be to nominate Senator McDowell as Father of the Nation and have everyone do whatever he says. Strangely, for all our disagreements, I would trust him as I would trust almost no one else in the public life of this country, now or for a long time. He is thoughtful and conscientious, and above all — for all his revisionist blather over the years — a true patriot.
Back in 1991, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising, I was commissioned to write an article based on interviewing the descendants of leading 1916 figures concerning their views about commemorating that founding moment of the modern Irish nation. By far the most intriguing contribution I got was from McDowell, who is the grandson of Eoin MacNeill, the chief of staff of the Volunteers who, on Easter Sunday 1916, issued the infamous order countermanding the Rising, taking out a last-minute newspaper advert and directing his men not to take part.
McDowell had already become well known for his trenchant denunciations of the Provisional IRA, and his impatience with sentimental versions of recent Irish history. I had expected an anti-republican rant, but got something rather more subtle. Predictably, he said he was proud of his grandfather’s intervention, but his view of the Rising itself was not what I was expecting on the basis of this connection. Asked about his view of Pearse and the sacrificial symbolism of 1916, he gave a surprising answer. He had, he said, found himself rather bored by the notion of debunking 1916, which had been fashionable since the 1970s. ‘My general feeling would be now that the violent blood sacrifice thing is not as absurd as some people might argue’, he said. ‘I wouldn't regard it as something that should be totally slapped down.’
Only someone like McDowell could get away with saying something like this — then or now. The moral authority of his lineage, stature, experience and personal stances had liberated him to say something that most Irish people might think but never dare utter. And he was absolutely right. Pearse’s notions of a blood sacrifice arose from his view that Ireland, being an enslaved nation, could only shake off that condition in a spectacular act of self-liberation. Freedom could not be a matter of incremental negotiation, squeezed concessions or trade-offs. What had been stolen in blood had to be reclaimed in blood also. We cannot assume that freedom came to us as of right: It most certainly did not.
McDowell is — on paper — a worthy successor to his eminent grandfather. In the wake of the March 2024 family-related referendums, in which the government was comprehensively stuffed, and in no small measure down to the contributions to the debate of one Michael McDowell, those of us who had in the past crossed swords with McDowell had, in all honesty, to admit, after the previous year or so of his skilful battling of Woke assaults on free speech and the Irish Constitution, that there was more to him than we had hitherto gathered. His performances speaking in Seanad Éireann throughout much of 2023 on the proposed ‘hate speech’ laws, may be one of the most significant contributions by an Irish politician in the history of the State. This followed and tin-hatted several other important contributions in that same debate, by Senators Ronan Mullen, Sharon Keogan and others who have been part of a rearguard defence of Irish democracy at the 11th hour and the 59th minute.
My sense of things remains that, if we are to be spared the horrors of a Fine Gael-led witch-hunt, it will be largely thanks to McDowell, who has essentially shamed the political establishment for its disgraceful attacks on our democracy and Constitution.
McDowell does not present in the necessarily oppositional manner of a dissident (or ‘dissenter’ like myself) but in the mode of a sober and responsible public representative who — and in the best possible taste — knows he knows more than anyone else. Lachrymose as it may sound, it is as though, in that aforementioned process of catch-up, Senator McDowell is emerging as the natural leader of the Irish people in a time when those we had nominated to the role have all revealed themselves to be either criminals or psychopaths or both. It is like a dream of the old normal, several years into Soviet Ireland, and McDowell, at the tender age of 73, strides out as our John Wayne, our Clint Eastwood, our Magnificent One, our Batman and Robin all rolled into one. This sometimes caped crusader is a one-man parliamentary Opposition whose function and latterly assumed responsibility amount, in this new and scarifying moment, to no less than the saving of Ireland and its civil society and democracy. And I do not say this in any spirit of satire.
The evidence of McDowell’s courage and complexity had not been confined to recent years, however. McDowell, in fact, has been the most outspoken and consistent critic of mass inward migration into Ireland, going back to the early years of the third millennium, more than two decades ago. The record shows that, in his ministerial roles in the early Noughties, Michael McDowell had done a great deal to try to resist the deluge of migrants that he found awaiting him in office in the early years of the new century, but ran into the limits of politics in a situation whereby the system had already been stitched up with leftist apparatchiks and procedures which made any radical correction impossible. McDowell appeared to grow increasingly conscious that Ireland was facing a very serious crisis. In October 2003, addressing a Dáil committee as justice minister, he said that the vast majority of people who applied for asylum in Ireland were found not to be genuine, and that half of those who applied for asylum abandoned their efforts shortly afterwards. A year later, he announced a referendum, the Amendment of the Constitution Act 2004, to deal with an escalating scam being leveraged by mainly African women, who were arriving in Ireland while in an advanced state of pregnancy, delivering their babies here, and thereby automatically entitling whole families to become, in effect, Irish citizens. The referendum — to abolish the principle whereby anyone born in Ireland automatically became an Irish citizen — was overwhelmingly approved by the electorate. I, as it happens, opposed that proposal, believing it to be a retrograde step by virtue of what I considered the sacred nature of the connection between birthplace and identity. To be truthful, at that stage I had no sense of what was coming — the total swamping of the Irish population in their own homeland. McDowell, I now believe, saw it when almost nobody else did. He was right; I was wrong.
In 2005, the Irish Independent reported an address made by McDowell to a Dail Committee on Justice, Defence, Equality and Women's Rights, in which he lambasted the system of vetting asylum seekers, and the ‘politically correct' views that were enabling this to continue. He said the patience of Irish people would be ‘very much tested’ if they knew the stories being told by people looking for asylum. ‘Cock-and-bull’ and ‘far-fetched nonsense’ were being proffered by people seeking asylum in Ireland, he said.
He read out a list of the kinds of bogus claims being made by asylum seekers, including: ‘a first cousin of the applicant having been involved in a coup 20 years previously, or an asylum seeker having been selected by a cult for ritual sacrifice’; ‘fears of persecution from a secret cult’; ‘fear of local tribal customs as the first born son of a royal family’; ‘fear of village elders arising from requirement to replace grandmother as head of the village’; ‘successor to be king after father's death’; ‘treated as a domestic servant by mother's friends’; ‘sacrifice of first born child’; ‘fear that a former employer may kill her and place body parts around his house’; ‘fear of persecution for failing to bring home the bodies of deceased family members killed in a fire’ — et cetera.
He also described applicants engaging in other forms of deception: seeking to bypass the rule whereby, by the terms of the Dublin Regulation, they are required to seek asylum in the first safe European country they enter. In the same intervention, he described hordes of asylum seekers arriving without papers, unable to say how they got here. ‘They don't know how they get to Ireland because there are no direct flights, and they can't explain.’ he said. ‘I would like to interview these people at the airport, but the UN insists that I go through due procedure. As soon as we go through due process and the gardai arrive, they lift the phone and call a lawyer, who gets them a judicial review to get them taken off the plane.’
Although services for asylum seekers were extremely expensive, he said, he had never seen ‘anybody involved in the NGO sector admitting there was a major problem with bogus asylum applications.’
‘There's a lot of political correctness that goes on here, and it is manifestly bogus, far-fetched nonsense and it's about time we said it’.
These grotesque abuses of our country by our political and civil service classes were at no time sanctioned by the people of Ireland. As Senator McDowell has from time to time intimated, it was at no time permitted, never mind proposed, that we ‘debate’ what was happening and allow our democracy to decide how the problems facing us might be remedied by our own lights. Mass migration was presented on a take-it-and-shut-your-face basis. There is a reason why the calculated final silencing of the Irish People is escalating now: It's because those responsible know that what they are doing is dishonest and wrong, and could not pass muster in the cold light of democratic day.
This is one of the reasons why Michael McDowell ought to use his moral authority to stand between the tyrants and his beleaguered people. As our Elder Political Lemon, he represents the last bulwark in our democratic republican system — the anchor man, you might say, against arbitrary action and casual abuse of the legislative process for political purposes.
But there remains a problem, which is rather dismayingly illustrated by that bothersome New Year’s Day article. This problem relates to the essence of what has happened to political systems throughout the former Free West in the past five years: the unspoken (in the mainstream) sense that something radical has happened that has altered everything and everyone working within those systems, demanding some kind of previously unimagined ‘loyalty’ to an unannounced takeover of democracy by deeply undemocratic forces, which nonetheless exert extraordinary influence, if not coercive persuasiveness, over what is done and what is said within those systems. The definitive upshot of these changed conditions is a sense that politicians, too, are muted and/or lockjawed, that, while they may behave in ways that resonate with our past memories of the normative working of these systems, they are nevertheless operating within tight boundaries in the matters of speech and action. I may be wrong, but that Irish Times article had the cut of an ‘intervention to normalise’ — an attempt to insinuate that everything in the present is hunky dory, and that we should be on our knees thanking our glorious leaders, rather than, for example, peevishly counting excess deaths or complaining about their being 15,000 Irish people sleeping — for all their government cares — under the stars, while the creme de la creme of African prisons live it up in five-star luxury, with the Irish taxpayer picking up the tab. If Senator McDowell has been fiddling on the deck of the Titanic, it is time to lay down his violin and speak to his people about serious matters. If he still does not know what these matters are, I shudderingly suggest that he ask around among the ‘far right’ figures he periodically excoriates.
The erratic behaviour of Michael McDowell in the immediate wake of the launch of the ‘Covid Project’ (© World Bank) provides a rather salutary example of the odd quirk of unreliability he manifests occasionally and for no particular apparent reason. Back in April 2020, when I was immersed in putting together a legal challenge to the lockdowns, I had this faint but hopeful intuition that the cup might be taken away from me by virtue of the fact that the initiative would be rendered unnecessary by the intervention of someone far more qualified and equipped to take such an action. And the singular person who sprang most immediately to mind as being capable of doing that very thing was Michael McDowell, a man for whom, despite our differences, I retained a snakin’ regard. He is, in many respects, brilliant. He might, I fancied, be our nearest equivalent of the admirable Lord Jonathan Sumption, who bravely entered the Covid fray in April 2020. I fully anticipated, therefore, that I would encounter him glowering at me over his spectacles upon our arrival at the Four Courts, ex parte applications in hand.
Alas! As I learned too late, on the day the Covid laws were passed by the Dáil, McDowell — suddenly abandoning his suspicion of the State — had an article in the Irish Times in which he argued for beefing up the powers of government and health agencies ‘to deal with Covid-19.’ The law, he claimed then, ‘needs an urgent review to deal with a pandemic in modern times.’ That was that then, I reckoned, putting my head back into the deceased rainforest before me.
The following September, a rather different McDowell came out shooting in the Seanad, attacking the HSE and the government for the differential treatment being meted out as between meat plants and restaurants. In a fiery speech, he declared: ‘Closing down restaurants — this day, in this capital — is going to condemn vast swathes of vulnerable, underpaid people to go home to their bedsits or wherever they are, and spend weeks alone in those premises without proper wages.’
He claimed the move had not been scientifically justified, and ‘flew in the face of the strategy’ announced by the Government to reopen pubs that same week. He went further, adding that ‘neither HSE nor NPHET deserve our respect,’ and were imposing on the country ‘cruel and wasteful policies’ that were damaging the economy.
The following month he was bellyaching as to whether the second lockdown, just announced, was actually necessary and wondering if the government had been ‘panicked’ into it.
All good knockabout stuff, if a little late in the day. But, despite all this, he made no concrete effort to challenge what had been happening or seek to put it to rights. It seemed that he did not have the gumption to become the Irish Sumption.
There was also that disquieting AstraZeneca episode in 2021, wherein McDowell protested at the withdrawal from the market of said injection. AstraZeneca was associated with increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, though this risk was said to be lower than with Moderna or Pfizer.
Michael McDowell, for all his admirable characteristics, has yet to speak ethically about the Covid crime. Okay, we might decide that, like almost all politicians, he was weak on ’pandemic’ questions generally. I do not seek to draw a veil over those abominations, but again would seek to offset against them his excellent interventions on the March 2024 referendums and the 'hate speech' laws, which would have been impressive at any time, but were little short of sensational in the times that had then descended upon us.
But, but, but . . . There remain aspects of his behaviour that do not add up to anything coherent. There are these constant weird and incomprehensible interventions, whereby it appears that he does not, in fact, understand what has been happening to our country, or in the world generally, at even the most rudimentary level — as though he believes that the obsession with ‘hate speech’ laws is merely some incomprehensible overreach in the name of politeness and compassion, and that the mass influxes of unvetted foreigners is similarly the consequence of over-zealous kindness on the part of his fellow politicians. Judging from his couching of the ‘hate speech’ issue, it sometimes appears that he believes something along the lines that his political colleagues have all been struck down by a kind of politeness virus, which compels them to introduce nice, protective legislation to benefit people with, for example, darker faces and atypical sexual proclivities. It may, in time, be necessary to conduct an intervention, and point out to Senator McDowell that what has been happening has no more to do with an excess of courtesy than the Covid exercise had with concern for public health, and that it is all part of the same globalised coup, in which a majority of the democratic representatives of what was not long ago called the ‘Free World’ has gone rogue in the service of some of the darkest forces on the planet in plundering and enslaving the human population and — in the particularised context of ‘hate speech’ laws — ensuring that nobody gets to raise the alarm of call out the chief culprits before that scheme is so well advanced as to be unstoppable.
McDowell is different. Sure, he is a bit of an old bruiser. He can be abrupt, reactionary in a pseudo-liberal kind of way, and occasionally hypocritical (as, for example, in his recent criticisms of those resisting enforced mass migration for saying the same things on that subject as he was saying two decades ago), but he is, nonetheless, a genuine liberal in the classical sense, which is probably the only sense that counts. He has been, in the politics of our times, in some respects the very antidote to Michael D. Higgins’s soft ‘liberalism’. He believes in democracy and liberty, which only a very tiny rump of so-called public representatives in the Oireachtas now appear to do. For all that I have been conscious of his flaws, I have always quietly regarded him as a potentially vital champion of freedom, someone to whom we might look when all around him were losing their marbles, as is now the case; someone with the moral capacity to save us from the stupidity and malevolence of his political contemporaries. As a former Tánaiste, justice minister and attorney general, as well as an eminent senior counsel for many years, he has packed a significant ethical heft, as well as attracting considerable public support across a broad swathe of Irish society. In view of the moral collapse of the Oireachtas, and the Presidency in the time of Higgins, he now stands as the de facto moral leader of the Irish political domain.
We are passing through the most evil period of Irish history since the genocides of the 1840s, except this time curated by our own people. At a time when the human race is more at risk than for a long time, liberalism has folded its tent and slipped away. We watch our loved ones die of a poisonous injection mandatorily pushed by wicked and/or stupid politicians, scientists and doctors, its logic of destruction enforced by alleged police officers and, where challenged or breached, ‘vindicated’ by purchased judges incapable of lying straight in their beds.
We need Michael McDowell, or someone like him — and there is no one with remotely his experience or stature — to stand up and be the one to take the initiative to staunch the seepage of malignant pus from every one of our public institutions. And we need him to make his first move it in the next three weeks, while the Seanad elections are in train and we are as yet in but the first month of what promises to be a fateful year, to set out his stall and manifesto for how he might propose to restore Irish democracy and public decency to the level these had attained, say, forty years ago, and in doing to emulate the honourable status of his late grandfather, who stood in his own time on a matter of principle, risking everything, including his life for something in which he passionately believed.
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