Podcast: 'We, the People' — Romantic Ireland, RIP
'That’s what we’ve been reduced to: a below-the-waist society. The head and the heart is gone. The passion is gone. The imagination is gone.'
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
— W.B. Yeats, ‘September 1913’
Escaping the Below-the-waist Society
I was on this week with the two Stephens on the 'We, the People’ Podcast, to speak about the State of the Irish Nation, and by implication all the nations of our former Free World, currently being dismantled in the name of globalist transhumanism and turned into godless, nihilistic, hedonistic wastelands, where no form of loyalty any longer matters and the ‘things of the spirit’ are sneered at and trampled upon.
‘The Celtic Tiger was a pseudo-reality. And one of the things it did was prevent people any longer stating the things that were going wrong with the country, because the conventional wisdom was; “There’s nothing going wrong with the country! Are you mad? We’re the richest country in the world blah, blah, blah!”’
‘The people doing this do not want people to have any higher values than, pretty much, you know, below-the-waist values — is what I call them. And that includes the pockets as well. The pockets and the other stuff, these are the entirety of the agenda now! And you don’t have to look far in this society now to see that. And that’s it! That’s what we’ve been reduced to: a below-the-waist society. The head and the heart is gone. The passion is gone. The imagination is gone. And we’re just this kind of society now where it’s a daily thing, and we’re supposed to swallow it, where hairy-arsed men are queueing up to twerk their arses in front of our children’s faces. And if you don’t think this a great idea, you’re a bigot!’
‘The only good scenarios that I can now foresee for this country is that it will descend into kind of abyss of desperation, and our people will have to retreat out of the cities into the countryside, and find places to live, restore old houses or whatever, and then start again, and hopefully that, in the fullness of time, a crop of manhood will rise again out of this country, to take up the cudgels left down by Collins and Pearse — and de Valera, in fairness — and finish this once and for all.’
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Article from the Archives
‘The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland which we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit — a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live.’
— Eamon de Valera, St Patrick’s Day speech, 1943
And here is a 2009 column of mine from the Irish Times (then still a half-decent newspaper) in which I reported on my ‘researches’ into the question of whether the meltdown of the global economy and the implosion of the Celtic Tiger might have had a chastening effect on the condescension of post-‘prosperity’ Ireland towards de Valera, on account of this much-caricatured speech. Some hope!
Despite the mess, we still sneer at Dev's speech
The ‘comely maidens’ caricature is used to dismiss ideas contrary to our ideal of progress, writes JOHN WATERS
