Saint Patrick's Day Bonus Content: Diary of a Dissenter

Saint Patrick’s Day is nowadays the greatest horror inflicted by Ireland on itself and the world, a cultural atrocity with no equivalents in the most grotesque excesses of other nations and peoples.

Wherever Green is Torn

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SUNDAY

It is astonishing — is it not? — the capacity of the human to push unpleasant thoughts out of mind, and then, simultaneously knowing and not knowing them, to proceed with life as though on the presumption that they could have no possibility of truth?

I caught myself out in such a manoeuvre this morning, going through the final proof copy of my book. Taken in the round, the whole thing, obviously, is shocking and unspeakable (not the book — the subject matter), and to a high degree I carry that sense of shock around with me all the time, occasionally speaking about it. But this particular tripping over something for the first time in a while seemed to throw me some distance further into incomprehensibility. I was reading a chapter dating from March 2023, titled 'Covid, the Law, and the Drums of War!', which outlines detailed research relating to the now established fact that the Covid Project was a military operation, and in no sense health-related. This research was, in the main, carried out by two female journalists, a Russian artist and writer called Alexandria (Sasha) Latypova, and an American, Katherine Watt, who writes here on Substack as bailiwicknews.substack.com.

I give a fairly detailed account in the chapter of the research, of which the central gist is conveyed in this quote from Latypova who, two years ago, asserted and outlined that the mass injuries and deaths by the mRNA/DNA injections are intentional, and should be investigated as 'a crime of mass murder and attempted mass murder by poisoning’. She also said that the lack of any enforcement action by the US Department of Health & Human Services on foot of these injuries and deaths was also intentional, as demonstrated ‘by the now very obvious refusal of the officialdom to stop or limit them in any way, despite clear evidence of their harm’:

We have a mass murder/mass injury event ongoing and bodies are piling up. The deaths and injury are the result of the forced injections of ‘health products’ that do not comply with any regulations for pharmaceuticals nor the lists of ingredients or advertised chemical composition. Thus they should be deemed de facto poison. Even if the manufacturers managed to produce these substances with fidelity to the label and the law, the products would be still extremely dangerous to administer on a mass scale due to numerous toxicities built into their design, which is perfectly well known to the regulators and manufacturers. Albeit, the latter got rid of employees with expertise and conscience to know this in the years immediately preceding ‘covid success’, and replaced them with diversity hires and software. The needles are in the hands of ‘nice people from healthcare’ who are doing their jobs as commanded by their superiors. I am tracing this organization back, starting from the weapon of murder and assault — the needle. 

There is more, but this is more than enough to convey my point. I wrote about this shortly after discovering it, about two years ago. Reading again today what I wrote then, I was shocked anew to the core of my being. I wanted to get up, rush out and start screaming to the high heavens, but it was six o’clock in the morning and I would probably have been wasting my breath. Yet, the thought struck me: I had been carrying this knowledge around with me for two years and somehow managed to accommodate it in my being and soul while simultaneously doing all kinds of banal things, like writing articles about comparative trivialities, reading mediocre novels, slurping coffee in the sunshine while talking with some muted myopic or other, and listening to Bob Dylan.

How is this even possible? Is what those two women wrote true or is it not true? To my certain knowledge, it is true, since it accords with all kinds of other witnessing and the researches of both women — each working alone — stand up as independently impressive. What then? Does it mean something or nothing? Something, obviously. How then can ‘life go on’ even though nothing is being done to address the matters they have told us about? Yes, that chapter has appeared here on Unchained, and will be available in my book in a few weeks, but shouldn’t I be electrified with rage or frustration or something of that order on a 24/7 basis? Shouldn’t this knowledge have changed me utterly? What is my excuse for thinking, talking or writing about anything else? How could I be able to function at all while carrying this knowledge around, albeit lying dormant in some remote corner of my mind?

With a sobering irony, probably the main reason it is possible for me (and others who know the truth of what is happening) to do so is because of the working of the pseudo-reality which it would be naive of us to imagine ourselves immune to. The mutism that persists abroad in the wider world ensures that, most of the time, most of us who are out and about in the spaces governed by the cultural power of the corrupt media have no immediate access to such knowledge, for the simple reason that there is neither sight nor light of it there. In those spaces, therefore, because no one speaks of these matters, they cease to be true, or have no factual place — not literally, perhaps, but for all practical purposes. The visages of those we meet, for all that they might be dead-eyed and frowning, betray nothing of the enormity of what we know to be solid fact, and so, in the course of those encounters, at some deep level within ourselves, some ancient programme is tripped which assures the watchman within our minds that everything is as it has always been, and all is well with the world: every day, in every way, things are still getting better and better. I know this because, if I stop, remembering the terrible things I know to be true, and look around me, I see nothing or hear nothing to affirm what I seem to remember as the factual situation, and what I see before me seems the same as it has always been, before the Ides of March 2020, before even the turn of the millennium, as far back as I can remember becoming familiar with whatever place I am in, and probably long before that. Continuing on, then, what fills my mind is not the thoughts of the horrors I am aware of, but simply the surroundings, which are familiar and entirely innocent of any evildoing, and therefore benign. In these circumstance, I ‘forget’ what I know, at least until the next time I am reminded, or remind myself, and then I am stunned and overcome all over again.

The point is that it is a mistake to believe that, just because you ‘know about’ the pseudo-reality and how it works and imposes its effects, this doesn’t mean that you are impervious to its influence. In fact, in addition to being a constant instrument of misdirection and suppression, it collaterally relieves those who know something of the full truth about reality of carrying that burden around all the time, through vistas and streetscapes in which virtually no one else is aware that anything at all is amiss — at least for while you are in it, and perhaps for an amount of time afterwards. If you spend a lot of time moving through such locations, you are likely to develop something akin to a constant amnesia about the horrors that are actually oscillating in and around the quantum structure of the world

Those people we meet or see in such places, even if they have problems relating to the matters we who are aware carry around with us, do not connect those problems to anything remotely akin to their true causes. Even if they are in some way directly affected, and even if we who are aware are conscious of — perhaps even sensitive to —  this as well: we know it is unlikely that they even dream that there might be anything about their condition or situation that is not organic, and certainly not that it might be in any regard sinister. If you try to tell them, the likelihood is that they will think you somehow more disturbing than anything they might be suffering, even if only unconsciously. This gives you a further reason not to bring to mind the terrible things you know, for by doing so you might put yourself in danger of blurting out the truth at the wrong moment or in the wrong place. (There is no ‘right’ place or time to blurt out such things.) What you know is not merely implausible; it is unthinkable and therefore ‘impossible’, or so says the pseudo-reality. And, somehow, the context of public places in which you move alongside those who know nothing of what you know carries this unknowingness as though in the very substance of the air, so that you breathe it in and are calmed. Somewhere deep inside, you are aware that this calm is bogus and futile, but you embrace it nonetheless, for in spite of amounting to delusion, this calm carries also a kind of comfort, which occasionally, in flashes, reveals itself as the comfort of denial. Somewhere deep inside of you, a voice whispers to no one in particular: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and you go about your business as though all is well with the world, and you possess not so much as a worry within it.

MONDAY

I know I promised to carry last week my investigation of David Hanly’s 1979 novel, In Guilt and In Glory, but it’s proving utterly unwieldy due to its length and too integrated to be curtailed by anything as unthinkable as editing. I’m not sure what to do. Maybe I’ll run it as an actual article over the Easter. My determination to hunt him down and tell him how much I admired his book has come to nothing either. I know where he is, but have not been able to ascertain anything concerning his state of health, and would not wish in any way to intrude on him or embarrass him in any way. I have to bear in mind at all relevant times that I have been turned into a quite reprehensible character by the exigencies of the autogolpe parcial, and that I should accordingly, in seeking to assess the impact of my putative arrival on the sensibility of someone who does not know me except by (terrible) reputation, take as my best functional reference benchmark the idea of Oliver Cromwell dropping by for afternoon tea.

TUESDAY

A friend relays details of a recent salutary experience in a Dublin carvery. He had gone in for lunch and fancied a bit of roast ham. There were two joints on the glass counter, one close to being exhausted, the other untouched. Because he likes his ham with a little fat, he asked the counter-server if he could have a couple of slices from the untouched joint, as there was no fat left on the other. The attendant, a Spaniard, refused, saying they would have to use up the other joint before breaching the new one. An exchange of views followed, in which the attendant became increasingly belligerent and determined not to oblige my friend, so that eventually my friend asked to see a supervisor. A female duly appeared, who it transpired was Croatian. She listened to the details of the disagreement, and declared her verdict: my friend would have to accept his portion of meat from the joint with no fat. My friend asked to see the manager, who shortly emerged from the depths of the establishment. He was Turkish. He too insisted that the nearly exhausted joint had to be finished before the other could be violated. My friend politely engaged him in conversation as to why this was such a major issue, since, without doubt, someone would soon come along who would be delighted to have the lean meat and everyone would, as a consequence, be happy.

After hearing him out, the Turk said: ‘You’re not Irish!’

Somewhat flabbered, my friend replied that indeed he was, and had lived in Ireland for most of his life.

The Turk declined to believe this, and proceeded to say so in French: ‘Vous n’êtes pas Irlandais, j’en suis sûr.’

My friend, who is fluent in French, replied in kind, whereupon the Turk emitted a victorious ‘Ah!’ and, reverting to English, declared: ‘I knew you weren’t Irish.’

There is something about this vignette that confirms and rather humorously illustrates something I have suspected for a long time: that many of those aliens currently living and working in Ireland have, for whatever reason, a profound hatred of the native people of this country, and seek every opportunity to gaslight and insult them, in the main by questioning any native right to preference or proprietorship. I do not believe this happens in any other country, certainly not in any civilised one. If a Spaniard in Spain, a Croatian in Croatia or a Turk in Turkey were to make a request of me in respect of some courtesy or concession that it might be within my powers to extend, I do not think I would question it. For this is what was happening: my friend was being refused precisely because he was Irish, and because all of the parties involved were perfectly aware of this. What was happening, then, was an orchestrated theatre of disrespect, perhaps even some kind of ‘game’ which supplied an established mode of ‘entertainment’ for those concerned. It is not at all unlikely that this is the outcome of NGO coaching, which we have seen in other contexts also — for example, in the determined refusal of manifest aliens to respond to question as to their origins by saying, ‘I’m from here!’, when clearly they are not. Whatever its cause, it is symptomatic of some deep animus, and it is deeply unpleasant. And we should not hesitate to say so, to each other and to the offenders, regardless of the inevitable chants of ‘wacist!’ from the stalls.

In the end, following three prolonged arguments, my friend got his dinner with two slices of fatty ham, the first cuts from the newly-breached joint, but only because, while the arguments were in train, someone else had come along and occasioned the termination of the fatless joint.

In days of old — now gone for ever — my friend’s modest request would have been treated with an immediate, ‘Yah, you’re grand, gimme me wan minute and I’ll sort ya out, boss!’ Instead we had a federal incident.

The meaning of this little fable is that, in its small way, it demonstrates something which we know to be true: that the much-vaunted ‘integration’ of the newcomers is not happening, but that something like an opposite process is in train whereby the native population are ‘integrating’ with the ways and demands of those who have come from outside. Thus, the ways and life of the Irish people are gradually being eroded, which is exactly according to plan.

WEDNESDAY

I’d been playing fantasies on my hard disk, some even in my dreams, about President Trump doing his Eamonn Andrews impression for the T-shirt mehole, sitting trapped in Zelensky’s chair with J.D. Vance practising his dart throws using the whining Corkman as his target. In the dream, Trump rises from his chair, picks up his Big Red Book, catching the Cork quisling’s eye and nodding meaningfully toward the door, declaims:

’Teashock Mehole Martin, you have one family in Ireland that, over and above all the others, inhabits your dreams and nightmares, and gives you more sleepless nights than anyone else. Tonight, you are here in Washington D.C, fondly imagining that, even if they were not safely at home in the county of Mayo, in the Land of Sodomy Begorrah, you were sufficiently safe from their incursions and declamations as to be able to relax and concentrate on pulling the wool over our eyes. But neither they nor we were going to allow your big occasion here in Washington to pass unremarked, and so they are here tonight in this very building, awaiting their opportunity to greet you. T-shock, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, all the way from Mayo — the Burke family!’

The door opens and in walks Enoch followed by his father Seán, his brothers Josiah, Elijah, Isaac and Simeon, and sisters: Amni, Esther, Jemima, Keren and Kezia and, bringing up the rear, the indefatigable matriarch, Martina.

The Burkes are our wild cards in a game of victimology in which, until they arrived, no one had any points except the Omnipotent Victims, who lorded it over everybody, stealing our rights, our freedom and our lives. To redress this, Enoch Burke did something emphatically Christian: he offered himself up as a sacrificial victim in order to counterbalance the Cultural Marxist power that was (at first) slowly (then suddenly) overwhelming his country and mine. Every one of the 530 days he spent in prison for refusing to utter profane words was necessary for him to acquire this power, which his family have now weaponised to take on the ugliest regime our country has ever suffered under. This time they’re going global, to confront the beast from the depths of its own belly.

Today’s initial news from the premature St Patrick’s Day celebrations at the White House — following the breakfast meeting between the Vances and the Martins —  was not auspicious. The indications were that Vance, who just fifteen months ago was declaring that the drafted Irish ‘hate speech’ laws were among the most tyrannical in the entire history of the world, and that, had they emanated from North Korea, the US would be considering sanctions, now seemed to have become chums with the appalling tenant-in-chief whose party had been pushing those same laws for the past five years. According to reports in the wake of the meeting, Vance had ‘reminisced about a road trip to Ireland that he and his wife had taken and spoke warmly about the "incredible community" and "beautiful landscapes”,’ as well as (deep breath) ‘a lot of interesting technological growth’. He also said that ‘one of the most robust areas’ for the US to work with Ireland in the coming years would be in technology, ‘particularly artificial intelligence’.

Not good. The lesser significance of this is that it possibly means Ireland being shunted to the hind tit of Big Tech — data processing — presumably after most of the sexy stuff has been returned to the home country. This may be presented as compensatory, but will be nothing of the kind, since data processing is something nobody else would touch with a drain-snake, for the very good reasons that it guzzles electricity and water, and provides virtually zero employment once the infrastructure is built. It also means that, in the longer term, as AI comes to be seem for the diabolical instrument it is, Ireland is likely to become a pariah nation, and possibly sabotage target, of the rest of the world’s former democracies.

This, as it merged with early reports emanating from the Martin/Trump encounter, cast me into a deep despondency. I heard the line about not being able to house your own people being a high-class problem, and what sounded like praise for Ireland’s shrewd industrial policy of renting out the shop to all comers, regardless of usefulness or ethicality. It was way too jolly to be wholesome.

I caught sight of a shot from an external photo-op, before or after the breakfast, in which the tenant-in-chief and the US Vice President were posing with their wives, who were wearing, respectively, a green dress and a pair of slim-fit green slacks.

Some famous words of Yeats’s crept into my head, and twisted themselves into a kind of curse:

I write it out in a verse—

Varadkreep and Mehole,

And McEntee and worse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible ugly is born.

I had to sit down for a whole hour after that and try to think it through to an aha! moment. In due course, I texted an interested friend:

I think I see the problem: There is currently no US ambassador to Ireland. The previous incumbent, Claire D. Cronin, left in January and Trump’s nominee, Edward Sharp Walsh, has not yet been confirmed by the US Senate. This would explain why every fucking word uttered by Trump & Vance in the White House today was the purest horseshite.

This notion seemed to fit what I was hearing. A still-captured embassy in Dublin, staffed by diehard Dems, sending out disinformative spin like the era of Joe had never ended.

I had to break myself into it gently, for this genuinely sounded bad. On the other hand, I rememebered some of the things I had observed in Trump over the past decade: his tendency to speak with forked tongue, to line up a series of 5D chess moves, to drown his victims in charm before drowning them for real. I remembered, too, a line from a legendary Atlantic article back in 2016: ‘The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.’ This is key to understanding what Trump is really saying.

Time to bite the bullet and face the music. What is done is done, I told myself — no point in hiding from it. Let the pieces fall where they may.

At first I was not reassured:

‘You know why they have a housing crisis?’ Trump asked the assembled journaliars. ‘Because they’re doing so well, they can’t produce houses fast enough. That’s a good problem, not a bad problem.’

The tenant-in-chief interjected at this point to say that this was ‘a very good answer, president’, a remark greeted with laughter from the floor, which shortly thereafter was to be condemned on Twatter as ‘tasteless’ and ‘inappropriate’

My feeling was that it sounded like something the president had read on a prompt card, perhaps supplied from the aforementioned US embassy in Dublin, still a hostage to spin, damn spin and propaganda. But I also noted a hint of hyperbole in President Trump’s delivery, which seemed to splash about in his laughter, as though he was seeking to flatter his visitor beyond the point of credibility and make this kind of obvious. His demeanour was exactly as if he was telling an Irish joke.

I watched it a second time and heard it in a different way, something like, Funny kind of ‘doing well’ that prevents a country housing its own people! To seriously make such an assertion as President Trump appeared to be making would obviously be to misunderstand the whole meaning of politics and government — to speak of Ireland not as a country but a lump of rock in the Atlantic on which transactions happen and in which the people, other than those involved in the transactions, are in the way. This, of course, is indeed what Ireland has turned into: the sand bank that, 175 years or thereabouts ago, Thomas Davis insisted it was never to become. The laughter was perhaps provoked not so much by the ‘Paddy the Irishman’ subtext of Trump’s words but by the suggestion that any self-respecting country would, with a straight face, admit to such a description. The laughter that ensued, chiefly from the assembled journaliars, seemed to support this interpretation.

But maybe I was clutching at straws.

I watched some more and became reassured. Trump had his guest’s number. The way he, as though gratuitously, drew down the transgender issue and launched into the mass migration issue at the deep end was totally unprompted by questions or context. The way he railed against the Dems’ stewardship of America resonated precisely with my sense of what the appalling Martin has done to my own beautiful country: criminals, murders, rapists being ferried in and stuffed to the gills with fatted calf, while our people — 15,000 at the last count — languish on the housing lists.

President Trump’s demeanour never changed. He flattered Martin and Ireland to within an inch of their lives. But all the time he talked over his head rather than conducting a conversation with him. Only twice did Martin get to speak, and oin both occasions he did so meekly and deferentially. You would never have guessed that this guy had been badmouthing his host for the past decade until the week before last.

Whenever he was making a point about the villainy or incompetence of the Democrats, Trump looked meaningfully towards his guest, who came to seem more and more like his prisoner, inviting him to agree that the Dems were indeed ‘terrible people’. He knew what Martin had come for: to leave with a cast-iron guarantee that Ireland’s FDI model of ‘economy’ would be left alone. This was about the only form of tenderness that was unavailable. In the end, Martin left the building with his pockets full of palaver and a promise that the termination of the Irish free lunch was the one thing he could be sure was going to happen.

This, then, became my ‘takeaway’: that Trump knew all about Martin, his appalling stewardship of the Irish nation as he orchestrates the sale of Irish democracy in favour of a ‘stakeholder democracy’, which means democracy by the permanent incumbents on behalf of external elites. He also knew all about Martin’s persistent and increasingly ugly attacks on himself. He knew he was in the presence of a toadying globalist sock-puppet, who had forced the abominations of abortion, homosexualist triumphalism and coerced multiculturalism on the people of Ireland. Hence, for all his back-slapping bonhomies, it was evident that President Trump’s purpose in this encounter was to deliver a single piece of truly bad news to the tenant-in-chief while at the same time keeping a fixed smile of benevolence and flattery: The party’s over, but you’re a great guy!

‘They took our pharmaceutical companies away from presidents that didn’t know what they were doing’, Trump intoned, ‘and you know, it’s too bad that happened.’

‘The Irish are smart, smart people and you took our pharmaceutical companies — and other companies — but, you know, through taxation, proper taxation, they made it very, very good for companies to move up there.’

The Irish were only doing what anyone would have done. No hard feelings. But that’s not the whole of it, because those big bad bullies in the EU were behind them, pushing all the time. ‘The European Union treats us very badly,’ he said, as though this entity was Ireland’s evil stepfather, keeping it a prisoner in a Brussels basement. He referred to the court ruling against the Apple Corporation, which saw some $14 billion plus interest of Apple petty cash being transferred from that company’s coffers to the Irish exchequer, although he foreswore to mention this latter aspect. President Trump was not seeking to make anything of this handy windfall for the Irish exchequer, but to deliver several more kicks to the EU, so that Martin might feel reassured that he was among friends. But that would be a hangover for Martin to contemplte in the morning, and today Trump had only one message to deliver. He had not come merely to bury, but to praise and then bury, so nobody could complain about his hospitality. At this juncture, Martin helpfully butted in to remind him that the Irish government had actually sided with Apple in that battle (disgracefully true, since it was the Irish people who would have lost out had Apple won), but Trump pretended not to hear.

‘They have not been fair,’ he continued, as though deaf. ‘They sue our companies and win massive amounts of money. They sued Apple, won 17 billion US dollars and they use that for other reasons — I guess, to run the European Union.’ (Martin did not intervene to clarify that the money is actually ‘resting’ in his own government’s account.)

‘So I’m not knocking it [Ireland]. They’re doing what they should be doing, perhaps for the European Union, but it does create ill will. And, as you know, we’re going to be doing reciprocal tariffs so whatever they charge us with, we’re charging them. Nobody can complain about that.’ (Especially not the ‘Irish T-shock’)

‘We don't want to do anything to hurt Ireland’, Trump said, speaking over the heads of the tenant-in-chief and assembled journaliars. Nobody noted the silent ‘but’.

And then came the punchline:

‘When the pharmaceutical companies started to go to Ireland, I would have said: That’s okay . . . But if you want to sell anything into the United States, I’m gonna put a 200 per cent tariff on you so you’re never gonna be able to sell anything into the United States. You know what they would’ve done? They would’ve stayed here.’

Trump glanced towards Martin and added, though to the attendance in general rather than to his guest: ‘He’s so lucky that I wasn’t!’ (Only once in the encounter did Trump address Martin by his name, but referred to him continuously as ‘he’.) This ‘he’s so lucky’ statement was a standard piece of Trump trickery with time, implying that the problem was in the past, the damage done and incapable of recall or repair. But, of course, in his tense-shifting way, he was actually telling Martin that this is what is going to happen in the future.

This was without doubt the most telling remark of the entire exchange. Martin’s response — reminding Trump of the number of Irish companies currently operating in America — was tactically ill-judged, seeming to proffer some kind of threat of a quid pro quo. That, of course, would be nonsensical, since there is no chance of the Irish government being able to impose a similar disincentive to attract its own firms back home. Irish markets are minuscule as compared to America’s and no sane businessman would volunteer to lose money by doing the patriotic thing. Trump know this too, just as he knows that all those who hate him have convinced themselves that he knows nothing.

P.S. FRIDAY

While all this was happening, the MAGA channels were speaking the name of Burke with increasing frequency and force. In the small hours of Friday morning, I awoke as though to the sound of a snapped twig, checked my phone and found there a video of several Burkes being kicked out of the National Building Museum in Washington, where there was in progress a special dinner in honour of the Irish tenant-in-chief, organised by the notorious funders of every kind of filth and poison, The Ireland Fund. Josiah and Martina Burke, I believe it was, who were rough-handled to the door as they shared with as many of the American population as could hear them that their brother/son, Enoch, had been imprisoned for more than 500 days by nice Michaél Martin’s government for the crime of refusing to bend the knee to transgenderism. The moral immune system of the Irish spirit of honour and decency had landed a critical blow.

And it was still only the early hours of March the 14th.

THURSDAY

With a title like ‘Civil War is Coming: Britain & America's Violent Future’, this one, recently posted on Whittle, ought to be a most interesting video indeed.

The subject matter is deeply urgent and very real, approximating to the contents of those interviews I did last summer with Michael Yon, though more specifically in respect of Ireland, where mush the same conditions now prevail as on our neighbouring island.

Unfortunately, due to the implacable refusal of the prosecutor of the thesis to simply state his case and own it, this interview is utterly frustrating and actually maddening.

The contention is advanced by Professor David Betz, of King’s College London, who seems to have undergone some kind of operation to remove any ability to utilise his own senses in constructing and presenting an argument. Betz is Professor of War in the Department of War Studies at King's College London where he heads the MA War Studies programme. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most recent book, The Guarded Age: Fortification in the 21st Century, is published by Polity, which I gather (I haven’t read it; can’t promise to!) is a book about the profusion of all manner of fortifications (modes of control) — including data! — in our modern world.

In the academy, there appears to be an unwritten law that everything must be sourced in the abstract; personal experience, or even observation, does not count. The correct approach is, in every case, to cite other academics saying things that are sources in the work of other academics. Like most of the profession, Prof. Betz seems determined to pin down a way of saying something without actually saying it. Instead of describing the actual reason for his contention — the increasingly volatility and bellicosity of Muslim populations in Western countries — he constructs an elaborate structure of secondary factors, in which he essentially suggests that most of the danger arises from native peoples seeking to defend their communities and countries. This is a pretty standard response to the escalating instability of the West from within its constituent nations, but I think this guy, Prof. Betz, must be hot favourite for the gold medal.

I used to watch New Culture Forum quite a bit but have lost track of it lately, and this is mainly because of its gratuitous dryness and going around the houses to say the most rudimentary things. The presenter, Peter Whittle, has good instincts, but he is too polite to demand that his guests climb down off their fences. Here, as I say, the dominant response of any sentient viewer must be frustration, as it is possible to detect what is being stated from the subtext, and yet it never properly gets laid out. Betz is a typical academic, hiding behind 'neutral' phrases and equivocations, as though he has no stake in the issue himself but is seeing it in much the same way as the UK government, which he clearly knows is stoking the pot of racial suspicion to the best of its ability — as the government here in Ireland is doing also. Peter Whittle is as though standing in a queue behind someone whose grasp of the language is inadequate to requesting his needs (for example, a couple of slices of fatty ham) but who nonetheless refuses to interject what was actually the onetime title of his programme, ‘So what you’re saying is . . . ‘ It’s fairly obvious from the subtexts of his questions that he knows exactly what's being said, but he seems to encourage his guest to construct further and better euphemisms, equivocations and evasions rather than setting out what’s on his mind. It’s likely, I suppose, that he's being cautious for fear of the YouTube censors, but still. In the end, he says they’ve run out of time and alarmingly asks if Betz will return for a further session later in the year.

I hope not. We already know what he is telling us. We have known it for a long time. The last thing we need is more dramatisations of our refusal to state the obvious, thereby giving succour to the gaslighters and would-be muters and censors as though they needed encouragement to mount up their not-so-petty tyrannies. Within seconds of him opening his mouth to begin, it is possible to detect what Betz is trying not to say. Nevertheless, we can read between the lines and we are left in no doubt that the danger he is declining to allude to is growing more real, and to know that he knows that it is not the British or American ‘nativists’ who pose the undoubtedly growing threat to our civilisation, but a certain entity that shall remain nameless, that you know and I know, and which can be identified only at the risk of committing a ‘hate crime’. Say no more. I said nothing. You know yourself.

FRIDAY

I’m in clover, for we’re strangers when we meet

Heel head over, but we’re strangers when we meet.

— David Bowie

Perhaps by way of ensuring that no one will ever again suggest that I run for the presidency of Ireland, I would like categorically to state today that I have for years loathed and detested Saint Patrick’s Day — possibly the least enjoyable day in the entire Irish year. Since it is so much in the news this week, somewhat ahead of schedule, I thought I might just make mention of this, accompanied by some little substantiating evidence.

By the way, I insist upon referring to March 17th as ‘Saint Patrick’s Day’. Not ‘Paddy’s Day’ or ‘Paddies’ Day’, or ‘St Pat’s Day’, all of which characterisations fill me with a creeping disgust. Even that ‘St’ part irritates me — what’s so difficult about ‘Saint Patrick’ — it’s only an additional three letters?

For maybe a quarter of a century, I have dreamed of a parallel world in which we Irish might again celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day with dignity and pride, looking to our finest qualities, achievements and potentialities. But ‘Paddy’s Day’ is nothing like this, and actually never really was. When I was a child, the native Irish adult community celebrated the day by sporting a discreet sprig of shamrock, and the young with an elaborate ‘badge’ comprising some tricoloured ribbons and a golden harp with a tuft of shamrock stuffed behind it. The best part was going hunting for shamrock on the evening before, and — defeated in this quest (it being Ireland, after all) — coming home with fistfuls of clover, for the benefit of blind men on galloping horses.

Small towns vied with one another to produce the most pathetic ‘parade’, comprising a brass band and a battalion of soon-to-be first communicants, or some such. That was it. Otherwise, there were no attempt to mount displays of what is nowadays called ‘Irishness’.  We were Irish, just as water is water. We didn’t need to make a song and dance of it. What we nowadays recognise as Paddy’s Day malarkey is actually an imported phenomenon, which emerged first of all out of the Irish community in the United States. Feeling somewhat abashed as a result of watching televised reports on the parades in New York and Philadelphia on the Six O’Clock News, we decided about thirty years ago to get in on the act, wherupon we ungraded the parade in Dublin to a ‘festival’, which would eventually end up as a show of ideological menace and power. This shift turned the day from a family occasion into a national drinking session. Now we go about the place on our national feastday acting as if we have swallowed the most gruesome version of ourselves and been turned a sickly green without benefit of face paint. The rest of the year we feel free to be outraged if someone calls us Paddies, but on Saint Patrick’s Day we are determined to prove their wacist prejudices correct.

What this aberrational exercise celebrates is not Ireland but the national talent for eejitry, a full-blown eruption of the national caricature, imposed from outside and jumped upon by the natives as a way of showing off that we’re all great crack. Sorry, c-r-a-i-c. (Am I the only one irritated by the insistence on spelling this Anglo-Saxon word as though it were Gaelic? Another symptom of Eejitry Syndrome.) And what this hints at is what each one of us knows already in his heart of hearts: that all of the things we parade on Saint Patrick’s Day are bogus, ‘reshored’ notions of who we are supposed to be. All the shamroguery and the buckleppery derive not from something in Irish tradition or the Irish character, but from the grief-distorted sentimentalism of our American diaspora. The native Paddy, however, with his finely-tuned sense of how to relieve foreigners of their hard and hard-earned currency, has thrown himself into the exercise of self-caricature with relish and abandon.

Saint Patrick’s Day is the day when the normally controlled explosion of national imbecility is set off in the middle of the town square, where a grotesque parody of national identity is played out in a haze of alcohol.  Of course, in this secular-‘rationalist’ Ireland, it is nowadays all but universally known as ‘Paddies’ Day’, the day when we get in touch with our inner leprechauns and disport ourselves in public as The People that Taste Forgot, pretending that, in portraying ourselves as lump eejits, we are being ‘ironic’.

Drinking twenty pints of Guinesss and vomiting in the Liffey may not be most people’s idea of a good time, but on Saint Patrick’s Day these become quintessential rituals of the celebration of Irish national identity.

By dint of some sick hullucination having imposed itself on our cultural understanding, these events are deemed to denote something called ‘Irishness’, though of course this miasma of Paddywackery derives not from anything even vaguely related to the reality of the Irish personality, but from a national imagination seriously compromised by the effects of ethyl alcohol.  Above all, of course, ‘Paddy’s Day’ is National Batther Day, the day it is considered an act of patriotism to get hammered. Asked while on a visit to the United States for Saint Patrick’s Day 2010 what advice he would give to Irish-Americans on their national feastday, the then Taoiseach Brian Cowen replied: ‘As I always say, take it easy early in the day. It’s a long day’.

What, for ten pints, could he possibly have meant? How can we complain about other people promoting stereotypes of the Irish when we do a far better job of it ourselves?

As usual, next Monday, then, we will arise to the sobering thought that it will be impossible to walk about in public in this Republic and not be accosted by men wearing ridiculous green hats and public address systems playing skondonktious ballads performed by be-geansied caricatures with wet brains and facial twitches.

And, as usual, my friends abroad will unwittingly send me greetings based on something like the assumption that I will be, in a different sense, abroad, out standing in my own field from early morning, sporting my green pantaloons and emitting ejaculations like ‘Top of the morning to ye all begorrah and faith it’s a fine day we do be having'.

If we were honest, which congenitally we are not, we would admit that Saint Patrick’s Day is the most dismal day in the Irish calender.  It is always, for a start, freezing cold, the perennial bitter north wind bearing witness to the disgust of Heaven at this travesty of what is supposed to be a Christian feastday.  For me it has always been a day to endure before the onset of Spring, a final penitential rite before we shake off the gloom of winter and embrace the hope of Easter.

Because we Irish have such a ‘complex inner intelligence’ (self-delusion), in which everything is processed in multiple and contradictory ways, we assume that our self-celebration through the mediums of goblin masks, Guinness flags and inflated green hammers reads to outsiders as ironic. It doesn’t.

We may know we’re taking the p-i-s-s, but everyone else thinks we’re so profoundly — if lovably — stupid that we rejoice in our own eejitry.

The story goes that Patrick, born on either the north coast of France or the west coast of Scotland, was carried off by Irish pirates while still a young boy and sold to be the slave of a pagan Irish chieftain called Milcho. For six gruelling years, Patrick minded Milcho’s sheep on the bleak hills, until a voice from heaven told him it was time to go home. He ran away and made his way to the coast, when he found a ship on which he embarked on his journey back to France or Scotland.

Some years later, he experienced a vision in which the Irish people beseeched him to return and teach them the true faith. He studied for the priesthood and afterwards spent another 38 years preparing for his mission. On returning to Ireland, nearly 50 years after his departure, Patrick was set upon by a band of fierce men. History does not recall that they were dressed in leprechaun hats and singing ‘Ole, ole, ole’, but nor is there any evidence to reassure us otherwise. Dichu, the leader of this band of savages, raised his axe to kill Patrick, but his arm became stiff so he could not complete the manoeuvre. He fell upon his knees and was converted. After that, Patrick went all over the place, converting all and sundry from the evils of drunkenness and debauchery, encountering many trials and adventures along the way.

You heard that right: drunkenness and debauchery.

The reason I know about this stuff is that, when I was a child, I spent years reading the life stories of various saints, this being one of the rich veins of literature my father had accumulated in the back room upstairs, to which I would tiptoe whenever I was off school through illness (approximately one day in two). I’ve never forgotten my shock as a relatively small child on reading in a biography of Saint Patrick that the importer of Christianity into Ireland had made a deal with God that he, Patrick, and not the Almighty, would judge the Irish on the Last Day. Even back then, 1,500 years before Woke, Patrick was worried about the incorrigible licentiousness and debauchery of the Irish, and prayed that they might give up their oul’ sins and their feckless and self-destructive ways. This agreement with the deity followed on Patrick’s legendary Lenten penitence atop the Mayo mountain nowadays known as Croagh Patrick, where he prayed for what seemed the impossible objective of saving Ireland’s incorrigible population from eternal damnation. As Easter dawned, God sent an angel to tell Patrick that his prayer had been answered: that he had, in accordance with his request, been deputed to dispense judgement to all Irish citizens on the Last Day.

The implication, clearly, was that Patrick believed that he could be successful — where the Main Man had failed — in converting and reforming the savage race whose spiritual condition had become his sole responsibility. There is no recorded evidence that Patrick regretted his decision to ask God to charge him with this onorous role and invest him with all the attendant powers.

This means, inter alia, that most of our prayers are useless — that, instead of praying to God or the Blessed Virgin, we should be inveigling our way into the affections of our patron saint, whom instead we think of only once a year, and then from inside an alcoholic haze. So don’t forget, when drawing up your will, to stipulate that a sprig of shamrock be pinned to your lapel before they screw the lid down.

These recollections ought also to give us pause for thought about the mode and manner of our celebration of the national feastday. It is one thing that we have assaulted our own personality and facilitated its globalised ‘celebration’ in an orgy of buckleppery at this time of year. But it is quite another that we have done this in the name of Saint Patrick, the man who came here with the precise purpose of civilising us. Having from an early age contemplated the psychology of this most saintly of saints, I’m here to tell you that this is something he may well regard as unforgivable.

It is also said that Patrick went to his grave at the age of 120 regretting some unspecified act or offence he had carried out in the course of his life — something he felt had offended against the Christian education he had received as a child. Nobody is sure exactly what he had in mind, but there is increasing circumstantial evidence that the source of his anxiety was the series of events that led him to save Ireland from pagan perdition and the awful consequences that have since ensued. But one obvious way of interpreting his reported anxiety concerning the unspecified act of folly or error that he felt had somehow blighted his life is that he had another vision in which he foresaw how his own feastday would pan out and came to realise the enormity of the horror he had spawned and brought upon himself.

On reflection, it seems obvious why Saint Patrick went to his grave a worried man. Perhaps he had come to realise the impossibility of the task he had set himself and had caught a glimpse, in some distracted vision, of what his well-intentioned endeavours had inflicted on the world to the end of time. Even worse is the prospect that, when he finally gets to challenge Paddy with the sins committed in the name of national celebration, he will be told that the whole thing was done in his own honour, your worship. Paddy, as usual, will hope for a fool’s pardon and that will enable him to stagger through the pearly gates wearing a green hat and an orange beard, shouting ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to the Almighty.

Ireland is a great country, but impossible to describe. Sometimes, in the past, when I’d be giving out about some toxic gom of a politician, or some ludicrous phenomenon like the jailing of a man for refusing to address a boy as a girl, or vice versa, or creatively eliding the criminal levels of import duty on a particularly revolting non-indigenous vegetable, someone would ask me if I would ever leave this country. ‘Yes’, I was prone to say, ‘I would go tomorrow if I didn’t have responsibilities’. But of course, even as I was speaking, both parties knew it was a lie. 

My experience of spending most of last summer in Spain alerted me to the possibility that this was no longer the case.

Once, about ten years ago, I wrote an article to mark Saint Patrick’s Day in which I claimed that, in spite of all the manifold stupidities of its public realm, Ireland was ‘the only place in the world I could live in for more than a fortnight’. 

Whenever I’m abroad for more than 10 days, something starts to move within me — a kind of inner unease that rumbles and rapidly rises to a roar. Homesickness is a totally inadequate word for it. It’s the awareness of the absence of a fundamental element of my own being, which includes also the air, the atmosphere, the rhythm, the presence of Ireland.

In our attempts to remember and describe some sense of ourselves lost in the mutilation of our language and culture, we create webs of words that go around and around the truth about ourselves but never quite nail it. Thus, intriguingly, the splendour of our world-renowned literature may arise from our gloriously failed attempts to recapture the misplaced essence of ourselves.

There’s something utterly intangibly and indescribably unique about this country — to be detected in the landscape, the light, the smell of the rain, the lonesome spell-spinning of a tin whistle, the lightness of a joke, the chuckle of a shopkeeper, the wink of a weatherman, the ineffable difference between the dancer and the dance.

We all know what it is, because we feel it in our bones, but our every attempt to put words on it leads to muddles of misunderstanding.

I remember how that felt. I remember thinking like that. I’d like to feel like that again, But, right now, after the past decade, and especially the past five years of the worst and most tyrannical government in our country’s history in independence, I could no longer in honesty sign off on those few paragraphs.

Part of the problem is that the generality of people are no longer moved in such ways, which constrains them from anger at the abuse of their inheritance and therefore from resisting. And this, in turn, is the result of a caricaturing of our national identiy as a result of the interventions of ideologues, rabble-rousers and mediocre poets.

Most of us, I believe, have felt this essence that makes Ireland great beyond mere sentimentality or patriotic fervour; but when we try to put words or images on it, it comes out all green, horrible, furry and diddly-eye — and, of course, great c-r-a-i-c.  (I love diddly-eye, when it’s good and in the right place. I hate it blasting out the door of some leprechaun shop in Temple Bar.)

The falseness that invariably accompanied ‘Paddies’ Day’ ought to have warned us, years ago, that something was seriously awry with the Irish sense of self, and that this was a dangerous condition with so many ideologically-minded dung beetles about.

This is the problem with being Irish: that the ways we describe ourselves are mainly distortions of ourselves, frozen clichés that are at once both false and half-true. Patrick (‘Don’t Call Me Paddy’) Kavanagh talked about the ‘lie’ of the ‘Irish Thing’ – the falseness of the image of a nation of cute hoors in thatched cottages wearing shawls or peaked caps. Nowadays, such depictions, in movies or postcards, have the capacity to render most of us nauseous. But still — and here’s the rub! — cute hoors, peaked caps and thatched cottages do actually exist, perhaps across the road we live on, so that we are unable to tell the real from the caricature we have ourselves invented. What a joke God has played on us!

I write it out in a verse—

Varadkreep and Mehole,

And McEntee and worse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is torn,

All’s changed, changed utterly:

A terrible ugly is born.

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