The Speech Haters, Part II
No Sand Bank This
Ireland is Withering . . . Again
The publication of the draft hate speech legislation is an alarm call for the indigenous people of Ireland: Unless they want to see their country drift out of their ownership it is time for them to rise and tell the political and media bullies that Ireland is not nothing.
'My principle is this, that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested by right in the people of Ireland — that they and none but they are landowners and lawmakers of this island; that all laws not made by them are null and void, and all titles to land are invalid not conferred or confirmed by them; and that the full right of owners may and must be asserted and enforced by any and all means which God has put in the power of man.'
— James Fintan Lalor
Sometime last year, I had to visit a Garda station to produce my car insurance, one of those deliberately harassing strategies employed by the force against anyone seeking to defend their freedoms these days. When I was there, I decided — just for the heck of it — to lodge a complaint against the officer who had required me to produce my insurance, when the disc was present and correct on my windscreen and he had no probable cause for suspecting me of any offence. There followed a lengthy palaver in which the officer taking down my complaint had to read out to me various questions from a form and laboriously write down my answers. Coming to the end, he asked me a series of quickfire questions by way of satisfying the usual bureaucratic curiosity: age, address, nationality, etc. To the nationality question, I replied — naturally — ‘Irish’. The officer continued down the list of queries and a minute or so later asked me to nominate one of a number of racial categories: ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Person of Colour’, ‘Other’, or some such. I said, ‘I’m Irish.’ He repeated the question as though he hadn’t heard. I repeated my answer. He said that the question was obligatory and had to be answered by ticking one of the boxes. He repeated the list. I said, ‘I’m Irish.’ I couldn’t see which box he ticked, but I can guess.
I have never in my life ticked a box indicating acquiescence in the description White. It goes without saying that Irish people are not ‘White’. As E. Michael Jones has pointed out, they only ever became ‘White’ when they landed in America, and found themselves in the throes of an uninvited contradistinction rooted in the history of the country they had arrived in. Over the past couple of decades, we Irish have been undergoing a ‘training’ process to induce us to see ourselves as ‘White’ even though there is no context in Irish history, or Irish indigenous experience, for any such category.
In other words, we have been suckered into believing — in effect — that we have some kind of racialist past, that we are part of the post-imperial world, that we owe something, maybe even everything we are and have, to the Third World, that the moral situation of the average Irish person is indistinguishable from that of a direct descendant of King Leopold II of Belgium, or Hernán Cortés, or Napoleon, or Christopher Columbus, or Francisco Pizarro, or General Sir Evelyn Baring. Or, for that matter, Oliver Cromwell.
The sole issue of racism that has arisen in Irish history is that of the English towards the Irish. When we speak of ‘racism’ in Ireland, then, that — and only that — is what we ought to mean. Ironically, we mostly refuse to speak of it, barging past a line of English to apologise for the behaviour of their ancestors in refusing to lie down, while preferring to import a different brand of racism with which to accuse ourselves. This — precisely — is an inheritance from the many centuries of occupation and enslavement our people suffered at the hands of that ancient enemy.
To put it unambiguously: We are now at risk of self-cancellation because we refuse to acknowledge our own historical subjugation. Having been taught to blame ourselves, we look around for someone on to whom we might project our own enslavement, feeling undeserving even of pity for ourselves. Now, our ‘leaders’ and foreign ‘partners’ have tumbled to the pathology, they are only too happy to oblige. Thus has Irish ‘white supremacism’ been born.
Into these discussions there invariably tumbles a whole raft of straw men, all designed to sow confusion and exploit residual, misplaced guilt: Ireland was never racially pure, never ethnically discrete, always a mongrel ‘nation of immigrants’. There never was an Irish race. Irish culture doesn’t really exist, is a mishmash of elements drawn in from elsewhere, and we all came from Africa originally, and our ancestors were all Black. All this by way of intimating that there is no Ireland, no Irishness, no Irish People — therefore no claim of indigenousness. Ireland, by implication, is the barren dirtheap that Thomas Davis, the Protestant ideologue of the Young Irelander movement, sternly intoning the inspiration which was to send Pearse out to his certain death, insisted it was not:
‘This country of ours is no sand bank, thrown up by some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honoured in its archives of civilisation, traceable into antiquity by its piety, its valour, and its sufferings. Every great European race has sent its stream to the river of Irish mind. Long wars, vast organisations, subtle codes, beacon crimes, leading virtues, and self-mighty men were here. If we live influenced by wind and sun and tree, and not by the passions and deeds of the past, we are a thriftless and a hopeless people.’
Nobody, or almost nobody, suggests that Ireland is an unmixed ethnicity. All strawmen are as jockeys to the camel’s back: beside the point. And that point is that Ireland is not nothing, as many of the latter-day Strawman Builders would have us believe. These strawmen are intended to deceive and are either wrong or, where not altogether wrong, irrelevant. It is not necessary to be racially pure to be a distinct, discrete People.
Not nothing; something. No sand bank this. Listen well.
A race is not necessarily identifiable on the basis of colour or racial features. The point is that people whose people have lived in the same place for a long time have claims as of birthright. Their children inherit these claims. A People — i.e. those who have lived in a country and built it up with their loves and labour — have the right to the home their country represents, the right to maintain and defend it, the right to decide its fate, and the right to define the terms upon which outsiders should come and join them there.
Not nothing; something. Something great.
Irishness is not a matter of blood, that’s right. Almost nobody ever suggested it might be. It is a matter of soul and soil and song and laughter. More than blood, we are united by our funny bones. If you don’t get it, I don’t care where you were born, you’re not Irish and never will be. There’s nothing hurtful in this, no offence intended. If I went to Nigeria and stated pretending to be Nigerian, I’d soon be told what to take a running jump at. And rightly so.
It is, of course, possible for an outsider in due course (a piece of string) to become a member of a particular People (more or less coinciding with a Nation) on the basis of a demonstrated love for, allegiance and contribution made to that country, that nation, that People — but this is not something that can be plucked like a buttercup from a hedgerow.
Just as someone can become an American (as many of our forebears did) any person who loves Ireland and lives for an indefinite (variable) time within her boundaries as a loyal and faithful citizen can become a member of the Irish nation. Padraig Pearse said the same. For him and the rest of the 1916 leaders, freedom was, in the words of Wolfe Tone, ‘the rights of man in Ireland’. In his essay The Spiritual Nation, Pearse defined Irish nationality as ‘an ancient spiritual tradition'. His view of nationhood was based on that of Davis, who held that nationality was a spirituality, a power alive in the land, into which all those who lived in that land could become connected. By Pearse's definition, this did not exclude anyone who wished to bear it allegiance, although this did not mean that the Irish nation was simply the postmodern sum of influences brought together by happenstance or geography. It was not merely cultural, but spiritual. It was not confined to Gaelic Ireland, but Gaelic Ireland was its cornerstone. While the last Gael survived, Pearse said, Ireland would continue to exist, but when the last Gael died, Ireland too would die. Meanwhile, those who imagined some objection to this idea to arise from the presence of other nationalities did not understand the concept of nationhood at all. Nations are always being cross-fertilised from the riches of other cultures. This can make them greater and was part of what once made Ireland great.
Pearse's philosophy of nationhood was infinitely more subtle that his caricaturists were — or are — capable of understanding. It was, in truth, largely built around a concrete understanding of what happens to the minds of colonised peoples, and it would be another 50 years before anyone (Frantz Fanon in Algeria) would set down a more detailed and coherent description of this condition. Many of our errors in subsequent years arose from the fact that we had no guide to take us through the labyrinth of complexes which arise in the process of colonisation and afterwards. Pearse had a profound sense of the human necessity for particularity — of allegiance, of identity, of aspiration — a vision that has been unravelled by the misplaced modern belief that peoples can somehow survive without a core idea while ‘tolerating’ and honouring every other people's core idea.
In a sense, Pearse sought to parse the already mixed up nature of Irishness — Gaelic, Celtic, Viking, Norman, English, Scots etc. — into a single spiritual definition. Definitions of nationhood are always problematic, there being two conventional tests — jus soli (rights of soil) and jus sanguinis (rights of blood) — but also a third: rights of allegiance. It’s possible to hold to two or even more senses of nationality, like Sir Roger Casement, knighted by the English Crown, dying for Ireland, or JFK , the quintessential ‘Irish-American’, who was born American but died Irish.
Ireland is open to people who understand and respect all this. But, to avoid disaster, we need to make a distinction between people who wish to contribute to the collective wellbeing and those who come here to plunder what we have, either individually or in large numbers. Unless we see Ireland as a sand bank, this remains incontrovertible. If people come as part of large groups of their own people, it becomes less likely that they will assimilate and thereby tend to become loyal citizens of Ireland.
For an outsider to become Irish requires time, curiosity, time, respect, time, passion, time, work and, of course, affection, but most of all time. An outsider, or her descendants, achieves it in time by coming here, working, living, fitting in, building a life, sharing talents and personality, singing songs, reading Irish history, wearing the green with pride and knowing, showing love for and loyalty to where she’s fetched up. The process is subject to acceleration in various ways: getting married to an Irish man or woman; having Irish children; fighting, dying for Ireland.
The real problem that has emerged in recent years is the scale of what is being foisted upon us — as well as the fact of its foisting. We don’t need to resort to proofs concerning blood or soil — we just need to ask: What gives anyone the right to usurp the normative operation of our culture and people? And that ‘anyone’ includes also any Irish person who might think of selling his own people down the river. It is therefore arguable that some who might superficially be regarded as ‘indigenous’ Irish, especially those who seek now to destroy this country by treating it as such, or who use its destruction to enrich themselves or parade their virtue by giving away what does not belong to them, will have excluded themselves because their allegiance lies elsewhere. Indeed, it is such people, rather than any outsiders coming here on the false promise that this is a modern, democratic country of limitless means, that we should blame for what has been happening. If they weren’t doing what they’re doing, none of us would be concerned about a handful of outsiders coming to live here and, in due course, regarding themselves as belonging.
To establish a sense of how this process might work, we might look at the thinking of the great scholar St. Thomas Aquinas, the most influential Christian theologian in history. In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas divided relationships between natives and outsiders into two categories: hostile and peaceful. On the first he was utterly unambiguous: hostile outsiders — those opposed to the culture and creed of the host nation — should never be welcomed. Regarding peaceful relationships, he identified three categories, two of which were entitled to in effect unconditional welcome: travellers (in today’s parlance, tourists) and those who ‘came to dwell in their land as newcomers’ but without full citizenship. The third category, those who came seeking full admission to the nation, who, having pledged their allegiance to the nation, were required to wait for two to three generations before being regarded as fully integrated. The reason for this extended wait was that, if foreigners were allowed to ‘meddle’ in the affairs of a nation soon after arrival, ‘many dangers might occur, since the foreigners not yet having the common good firmly at heart might attempt something hurtful to the people.’ For Aquinas, total integration into the creed, life, culture, traditions and language was essential for full acceptance of the ‘stranger’. In other words, the ‘stranger’ bore the greater part of the burden for ensuring that he ceased to be a stranger.
This is no more than a common sense schema for the management of the throughflow of outsiders, emphasising the fundamental precaution of ensuring the needs of the host population are respected and protected, and that the preponderance of responsibility for the effects of inward migration is placed on the shoulders of those seeking to enter a country not their own.
For sure, Irishness is not to be gained by stepping off a plane and immediately describing your new hosts as ‘racists’. It is not attained by attacking anyone who asks you where you come from (because you look different to other people), screeching at them that, ‘I’m from HERE!’ when it is obvious that you are not. It is not achieved by issuing demands, on the second wet weekend of your presence, for ‘reparations’ in the form of land that was supposedly stolen from your ancestors, who lived in what is now Zimbabwe. Land?, Where? Lissananny bog, perhaps? Strong Zimbabwean connections down that way alright.
Stop, Stranger, I care not what colour you are. But keep your voice down, your lips for prayer only, for you have stepped on sacred ground.
Enough already. This is not complicated. Don’t pretend you don’t understand. Stop it now.
Multiculturalism means the mandatory dismantling of the rights, laws, and ways of the host culture, the de-Irishing of Ireland. And one of the more shocking things about the recent influx of what the political and media classes insist upon calling the ‘new Irish’ is that it is we, the native Irish, who are expected to integrate. Not only are we not entitled to make demands of people who come to Ireland, frequently illegally — for example, requesting that they respect our laws, ways, and culture — but we, it seems, must collapse our own culture lest the ‘new Irish’ take offence. We have been told that crucifixes in hospitals must be removed, and that schools must end all Christian prayers and practices. Politicians are now unashamedly seeking to usher in ‘hate speech’ legislation to subdue any lingering criticism of controversial governmental policies. The introduction of such laws is designed to subject the indigenous population of Ireland to an enforced regime of silence, and will almost certainly mean the irrevocable destruction of Ireland.
One of the many noticeable contradictions about the official attitude to mass migration into Ireland is the way the authorities continually assure the public that a majority of migrants have, for example, a third-level education (thus seeking to deny the escalating ghettoisation of many of our cities and towns), and yet the tone of the overall approach to the issue is that any person with a black or brown face is to be regarded like the nodding, starving plaster ‘black baby’ whom we lined up at the nun’s desk to give our pennies to in the classrooms of Ireland more than half a century ago. There is something more than a little racist about this idea that people who come here with different colour faces are to be treated like children, are not to be held accountable in the same way as people with pink or pale faces, but must be treated with kid gloves lest they take the slightest slight or offence. This pseudo-paternalism is a central plank of the ‘anti-racist’ armoury, plucking the heartstrings disproportionately by suggesting that a different colour face implies greater need and therefore a kind of free pass — over and above the urgency/priority to be accorded to, say, a ‘white’ English or Polish person, or —above all — a native person seeking assistance from the Irish State. Is this not also ‘racist’? — and not just towards the notional Irish person, but at least equally so towards the prospective black or coloured arrival, who is to be treated in the manner of a helpless child? For it was in part through this method that the European colonists of earlier centuries achieved their domination over African and South American peoples: by infantilising them and inculcating in them a learned dependency which made them slaves for life.
Unless constitutionally overturned, the ‘hate speech laws’ — the Criminal Justice (Hate Crime) Bill 2021 — will institutionalise this form of ‘thinking’ at the level of statute, enforceable by the Supreme Court. They will turn Ireland into a two-tier society of adult-children who cannot be looked crooked at and will have no responsibility for anything, and adults who will require to tiptoe around the adult-children for fear of offending them, to be held responsible for every conceivable remotely slighting meaning of their words or actions. The Bill, therefore, if made into law, will achieve all the things the authorities currently claim are resulting from our ‘racist’ society’. It will divide the ‘community’; it will give rise, in the absence of the capacity for verbal exchanges, to violent interaction; it will turn Ireland into a profoundly racist society. There are those who say that this is the intention behind it; that, as a Cultural Marxist instrument, it is designed to foment division and chaos, leading eventually to civil war. If so, it will in time be a resounding success.
The laws announce the importing into Ireland of an ideology called Critical Race Theory, a set of pseudo-principles that would have had no historical application in this country had we not first of all imported the raw material and afterwards built the ideological context to exploit it. As with so many related phenomena, there has been a tendency to see the introduction of hate speech laws as simple overreach — an excessively zealous response to a non-problem. This is naïve. The escalating ‘race issue’ in Irish society is a classic example of the syndrome known as ‘problem, reaction, solution’, by which power creates pretexts for stealing the rights, liberties and resources of citizens. Twenty years ago we did not have any ‘race issue’ in Ireland. The problem was imported by the political class, who engaged in reckless and undemocratic bartering with our European ‘partners’, the upshot of which was that Ireland imported hundreds of thousands of pseudo refugees and asylum seekers, for whose benefit the NGO sector was grotesquely expanded. (At the last count, there were 32,841 NGOs operating in Ireland, employing 165,075 people, at an annual cost to the taxpayer of €5.9bn.) Now we’ve ended up, in the middle of a pandemic in which the host population is locked down, with tens of thousands of further new arrivals being spirited in under cover of darkness, to begin accusing the host population of ‘racism’ the minute they touch the tarmac of Dublin Airport. In March this year it was reported that, at the height of the harsh winter lockdown, when Irish people were forbidden to travel more than 5km from their homes, multiple planeloads of migrants were flying in from Malta which, because of its location, is a prime target for people traffickers, and has availed of an EU programme that enables it to offload its burden of migrants on Ireland.)
Without consultation with the people, the political class, under instructions from elsewhere, have thrown open the gates of our homeland. The bought-and-paid-for media refuse to lead any kind of discussion on the topic, but instead operate to ensure that anyone daring to speak about it is immediately drowned in a tsunami of vitriol.
Hate speech laws are therefore not the genuine consequence of a real problem, but the contrived reaction to a manufactured one. To engage in argumentation as to the rights or wrongs of various above-ground disputations is to lend credence to a lie: that these measures are to meet the real needs of real people in Ireland who have a prior call on protection from the State. The purpose has to do with power, absolute power. The mass intake of migrants, executed under orders from the EU Commission, was in large part a mechanism designed to create a context for hate speech laws, for the purpose of subduing further the host population and disabusing them of any notion that they had any special rights in Ireland or that Irishness was anything special, something to be gained over decades or centuries and in the gift of the community. Now, we are tartly informed, the State decides everything, and the native Irish have become second-class citizens in what they naively imagined to be their own land.
The hate speech laws are designed precisely to ensure that people refrain from saying anything just in case they might say the wrong thing. They amount to a gagging order on the entire country. This is not a law in any of the sense that we think about law at the moment. It is the importation into the statute books of mechanisms forged at the anvil of Cultural Marxism, the most insidious and destructive ideology of our times. In effect, it extends the prohibition on comment or criticism to include whatever the ideologues can succeed in uploading to public prejudice, apprehension or ignorance — the incorporation into the realm of prohibition anything failing to meet what might be called the ‘sharp-intake-of-breath factor’ — in other words, anything that people generally can be persuaded is ‘offensive’ to protected categories which will ipso facto be deemed illegal. These laws declare you not merely guilty as charged, but guilty as accused, guilty as suspected, guilty as ordered.
The Criminal Justice (Hate Crime) Bill 2021 , if passed, will not be a law, for it defies every principle established in the history of jurisprudence. And yet it would become the most radical law in our history as an independent republic under the rule of law.
A couple of weeks ago, 25 retired French generals and more than a thousand serving military personnel signed an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron warning of the growing national disillusion leading to the possibility of an imminent civil war and openly calling for a military coup to remove Macron’s government. Their specific concern was that, unless the military stepped in, the continuing ideological myopia, incompetence and laxity of that government would result in the disintegration of the French nation at the hands of radical militant Islamists. The letter, posted on a ‘national populist’ website Valeurs actualles, warned government and legislature of several ‘deadly dangers’ that threaten France, including the simmering banlieue problem — the powder keg of poor suburbs around the capital, occupied by enormous immigrant Muslim communities from former French colonies. The generals said that, unless the current government could be overthrown either in an election or by a coup, the future of France would be grim indeed.
‘The hour is grave. France is in peril,’ the letter warned, asserting that ‘fanatic partisans’ and ‘a certain anti-racism’ was dividing the French community. It also referred to attacks on French history and, in particular, attempts to ‘start a racial war’, by tearing down statues of French colonial figures. The generals warned of an imminent balkanisation of France — a collapse, in the absence of a vibrant civic nationalism, into competing tribalisms and ethno-nationalisms.
The letter followed a recent renewal of militant Islamic attacks, among the latest being a fatal stabbing of a policewoman at a police station in Rambouillet, on the outskirts of Paris. The attacker, an immigrant from Tunisia, was shot dead by police. These events have created a surge in support for Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally movement, who is seen as having an increasing chance of replacing Macron as president next year. Le Pen has endorsed the letter and called on the generals to join her in her ‘fight for France’.
The Islamic population of France is now approaching 10 per cent, but moreover, the failure of most of these Muslims to assimilate into French society is driving the growing concerns of the French population about the policies and actions of their leaders. A recent opinion poll, conducted in the wake of the generals’ letter, revealed that 73 per cent of the French population shares their concerns that the French nation is disintegrating. Close to a majority — 49 per cent — would support a military coup, while more than half — 58 per cent — support the generals’ call to oust Macron from power. Three-quarters of those polled said that governmental ‘anti-racist’ initiatives amounted to reverse racism: By attacking symbols of French nationalism, they create even more divisions. Only one in three of those polled said they agreed with the government’s policy of punishing serving members of the military who had signed the letter.
All this can be seen as the chickens of French colonialism coming home to roost. France had a two-phased colonial history, stretching across five centuries, firstly in India, North America and the Caribbean from the 16th to the 18th centuries, and the second beginning with the conquest of Algeria in 1830 and extending to vast swathes of Africa, Indochina and the South Pacific islands up to 60 years ago. It is this history that has led to the growth of the Islamic population of France, as citizens of its former colonies come ‘home’ to the motherland in search of the life they have intuited was stolen on them by their erstwhile occupiers and oppressors.
Ireland has no such history. None. Yet, our leadership over the past two decades has seemed intent upon imposing on this nation a similar situation to that which currently threatens the obliteration of France.
Ireland is even less well-suited than other countries to what is called multiculturalism, for reasons that are altogether more complex than is being recognised, and this is something we ought to have been talking about for the past two decades when a ‘more diverse’ society was being ushered in by dead of night, and we were forbidden to question it under pain of demonisation.
America, which is held up as the model of ‘multiculturalism’, was in the past a melting pot, quite a different matter. This unique experiment was created with a Big Bang of aspiration in which all were proffered the illusion of an equal place and part. It worked, more or less, so that the US became a place that suggested itself as being duplicable. European cities have up until the recent BLM outrages looked to the US and wondered why they couldn’t achieve the same apparently complex harmony. But Paris or London or Amsterdam can never be like American cities, because their ‘multiculturalism’ is really just the transference of the colonial context back to home soil. The roles of native and settler have been reversed, and the hosts are perplexed when their condescension is no longer a sufficient protection. The ‘guests’ of the metropolis do not integrate, because they have no folk memory of being asked to integrate with the settlers in their own countries and cannot see why it should be any different here, now. What pertains is an uneasy truce, maintained by the avoidance of eye contact.
The difference for us, of course, is that we are not a former colonial power. It is true that the Irish Church played its modest part in the exploits of other European adventurers, proffering the promise of the love of Jesus in compensation for the loss of limbs and children to the rapacious invader. Nevertheless, the Irish native has little sense of this history and sees himself as the unambiguously innocent victim of English adventuring. In this he is not far wrong. What complicates the situation today is that the former colonial subjects of the English crown do not appear readily to make the distinction between John Bull’s bloody history and Paddy’s relatively harmless evangelism. They see only white skin and welfare potential and decide to pass up on the history lessons.
Ireland’s social welfare rates are well ahead of most other European countries, offering many immigrants a far higher standard of living than they could have from working full-time in their home countries. The asylum process is a joke, a process of bureaucratic misdirection that stretches out over several years, with most applicants disappearing into the crowd long before their cases come to hearing.
A conservative estimate of the current annual economic cost of this ‘multiculturalism’, when health provision, housing, education, legal services etc. are accounted for, puts it not far short of half a billion euro per annum, excluding the cost of the NGOs supervising the whole circus. Unemployment among immigrants tends to be some 20 per cent higher than among the indigenous population. These bills are being paid, in the main, by the working population of native-born Irish citizens.
No politician or political party ever went before the electorate with a truthful prospectus on how the face of Ireland was to be changed in this way. Back in 2004, when the enlargement of the EU was under public ‘discussion’, we were told that perhaps 10,000 people might end up coming to Ireland from Eastern Europe. Since then, something in excess of a million foreigners have come to Ireland and decided to stay, an additional 25 per cent of population without as much as a by-your-leave. A UN survey in 2017 revealed that Ireland had become the third highest European country in a list measuring migrants as a percentage of total population. Austria was top, with 19 per cent; Sweden came next with 18 per cent; Ireland was just behind, at 17.5 per cent. The UK, with a 400-year colonial history and a 40-year head-start, came in sixth on 13 per cent. France was eighth on 12.5 per cent.
Anyone seeking to raise this subject in a way that is other than an unequivocal endorsement of what’s going down — even if couched in the form of a question — is dismissed as a xenophobe or racist, a reflex meme that, having been pumped out by media for years, now insinuates itself at the level of everyday culture. Anyone seeking to question the numbers of Muslims freely entering Ireland in the past two decades, often in a context of potentially imminent global conflict between extremist Islamists and the West, is repudiated as a bigot and a hate-monger.
Ireland is now, after many decades of misrule by an incompetent and corrupt political establishment, culturally, intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually at its lowest ebb in independence. Being seriously compromised by incompetence, venality and indifference to all principle, our political class has ceased to represent the interests of the Irish people. Instead, those we call our ‘leaders’ pander to the wishes of outsiders — the EU, the UN, fly-by-night corporations availing of bargain basement Irish tax rates, the people smugglers of the Dark Continent, who with the domestic NGOs are the pimps of Ireland’s destruction. In doing so they have fundamentally changed Ireland’s cultural and demographic nature in the total absence of a public debate. The purpose of the ‘hate speech’ laws about to be rammed through the Oireachtas in the coming months is to ensure that this pattern is not disturbed as the re-plantation of Ireland enters its final and terminal phase.
This crisis manifests in multiple symptoms: unprecedented levels of homelessness; massive strain on health and transport services; politicians utterly beholden to the tax-dodging transnational sector and their need for cheap labour. There is zero parliamentary opposition on any of this. The national media have abandoned the role of making power accountable and confine themselves to attacking critics of the government. The public is utterly numbed and cowed. The point of the proposal to introduce 'hate speech laws' is to silence those occasional voices still daring to be raised to question the agenda.
Until relatively recently, the majority of our immigrants tended to be citizens of other EU countries, mainly from Eastern Europe; their presence in Ireland being a direct result of the collapsing of borders in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Ireland was one of just three EU countries offering a blanket invitation to citizens of other member countries, extending virtually unrestricted rights to such immigrants to live and work in Ireland on more or less the same terms as Irish citizens. It used to be the case that about a quarter of all non-nationals living in Ireland were Polish, with more Poles living in Ireland than there were migrants from the UK. This has been changing but the change has yet to be accurately quantified. Among the growing numbers of non-European categories of immigrant, the most significant numbers are asylum seekers, from Africa, Asia and South America. The media call them the ‘new Irish’. Many small Irish towns, in the least likely places, now play host to immigrant populations amounting to 20 per cent or 25 per cent, with a handful approaching 50 per cent.
The official figure for net migration into Ireland between 2014 and 2019 was estimated by the CSO to be just under 200,000, i.e. an additional 4 per cent. This information came with a health warning that it was ‘based on experimental annual methodology’, which probably means it was a radical underestimate. The statistics remain sketchy, probably as a matter of official policy.
Most people, if they are honest, report that virtually every streetscape in any of the cities or larger towns has more non-nationals than natives anytime they pay attention. A conservative estimate suggests that one in five of the current occupants of Ireland may be non-nationals, a trebling over the past decade. Official figures conceal the reality of this by emphasising net migration figures, which consistently include almost as many Irish people leaving as outsiders coming in.
For example, whereas net migration over the six years 2014 to 2019 has been estimated by the CSO at between 190,400 and 199,100, the Frontier Series Migration Estimates for Ireland 2014-2020 indicate that the number of immigrants arriving in that seven-year period was in the range of 778,300 to 897,200 while the number of emigrants leaving between in the six years 2014 to 2019 was estimated at between 587,900 and 698,100. This means that, every year of the last six or seven, an average of approximately 106,000 Irish people emigrated and 120,000 outsiders arrived. You can call this whatever you like, but I call it ‘replacement’. It seems odd that, as the world is invited in, our own people continue to leave the country at the rate of 9,000 a month, each one metaphorically meeting at least one migrant at the airport moving in to take his/her place. Much of this traffic is explained by the fact that many of the tax-dodging multinationals operating here, which were supposed to create jobs for Irish people, overwhelmingly employ foreigners.
Whereas, back in the middle of the last decade, the highest numbers of migrants were coming here from overwhelmingly Muslim countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, the pattern had shifted by 2019, when the highest numbers of non-Irish immigrants were from Brazil, India and Romania. [India has a significant proportion of Muslims — perhaps 15 per cent of the total population — whereas Romania and Brazil do not.] A similar trend continued for the first half of 2020, though it is important to stress that this does not necessarily mean a reduction in the numbers of Muslims arriving. There is no evidence of this having arisen from any kind of policy change: Migrants into Ireland appear to be more or less self-selecting.
At the end of 2018, Factmaps released a projected map of what the population in each European country is going to be by 2050. It predicts that Ireland’s population is going to jump by one-third — five times the average increase projected for other European countries. This would bring Ireland’s population to over six million by 2050.
The statistical picture is subject to constant media misdirection. As recently as 2016, RTÉ reported that, according to a report published by S&P Global Ratings, the Republic of Ireland's total population was expected to grow to ‘more than five million by the year 2050.’ In fact the Census of that year would show the population to be already at 4.74m. The current population of Ireland, as of Saturday, May 1, 2021, based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data, is 4,983,419. According to PopulationPyramid, the projected population for Ireland 2050 is now 5,677,619, rising inexorably through the 20s, 30s and 40s, until about 2060, when it is predicted — though no basis is provided for this logic — to level off at about 6 million.
In 2016, based on the outcomes of that’s year’s Census, the CSO engaged in a number of projections based on differing migration and fertility metrics to estimate the likely extent of population growth up to 2051.
What was dubbed the most ‘pessimistic’ of these projections assumed annual net inward migration of 10,000 and a declining fertility rate, which estimated that the population would ‘only’ increase by 17.7 per cent to 5,578,300 by 2051.
The highest projection was based on continuing high migration and a high fertility variant, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) maintaining at 1.8 over the entire period to 2051, coupled with annual net inward migration of 30,000. By this metric, the CSO calculated that the population would grow by 1,953,300 (+41.2 per cent) over the 35-year period to 2051, equating to an average annual increase of almost 0.8 per cent. In this model, 53.8 per cent of the increase would be due to net inward migration and 46.2 per cent to natural increase. The CSO’s 30,000 ‘net migration’ figure is a meaningless metric, since it camouflages the fact that so many Irish people continue to leave. And there is an important detail also to be noted about fertility rates: The TFR rate of 1.8 cited by the CSO is actually an overall rate based on the total population, and had already fallen to 1.7 by 2019; but if you confine the calculation to the native population, the fertility rate falls to an alarming 1.35. The difference between these two figures is far more dramatic than the numbers betray: In reality, whereas a figure of 1.8 enables a society to more or less maintain its population in the medium term, a rate of 1.3 promises a total collapse within two generations. Moreover, these figures have yet to reflect the full effects of the introduction of abortion in 2018, which (at a rate of approximately 10,000 per annum thus far) will soon take the indigenous birth rate to within a whisker of 1.0. What this will mean, most likely, is that the ‘migrant’ segment of the population will continue to increase under every metric, while the indigenous element will shrink more or less exponentially, so that the two are likely to cross at 50/50 somewhere about the middle of the present century.
Towards the end of 2015, it was reported that asylum claims were set to treble, with applicants from Pakistan and Bangladesh accounting for most of the increase. The population of Pakistan is 96 per cent Muslim; the figure for Bangladesh 90 per cent. Applications from both countries had multiplied by, respectively, eight and four times during 2015, when the two countries accounted for 54 per cent of all asylum seekers coming to Ireland. Most of the applicants were young men, who came via Great Britain or Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, deportations of asylum seekers whose applications had been rejected were on the decline. Recently, the Government announced that 17,000 illegal immigrants were to be given residency permits, an initial step towards full citizenship. The Minister for Justice referred to this as a ‘regularising’ exercise.
There were 63,443 Muslims in Ireland in April 2016, representing 1.3 per cent of the population and signalling a continuing steady growth. Ireland’s ‘Muslim community’ grew from 3,875 persons in 1991, to 19,147 in 2002, 32,539 in 2006 and 49,204 in 2011. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of Muslims nearly doubled, increasing by 95 per cent. At this rate of growth, Ireland might expect, within 25 years, to be where France currently finds itself — albeit minus the imperial/colonial history.
You need to repeat this to yourself: ‘Ireland was itself colonised; France was a colonial power for 400 years. Ireland was never a colonial power, was occupied for 800 years Ireland is taking in nearly 50 per cent more migrants per capita than France is.’
Say it a hundred times and see if it sinks in.
Back in the early 1950s, before I was born, a book called The Vanishing Irish was published in the United States. It contained 18 essays by 15 contributors, all describing the demographic catastrophe then believed to be threatening the very survival of the Irish people, the main factors being late marriages and emigration, programmed into the very DNA of the Irish race by poverty and desperation. Among the contributors were the essayists Seán Ó Faolain and John D. Sheridan. In a contribution entitled We’re Not Dead Yet, the latter wrote of the ‘racial despair’ then afflicting Ireland, a despair he traced back to the so-called ‘Great Famines’ of the 1840s, which he believed had instilled in the Irish a belief that ‘the race could not survive’. He had in mind the mid-19th century Irish Holocaust, a studied programme of extermination designed to purge Ireland of its indigenous people.
‘Despair of this kind is deeper and more lasting than any personal despair,’ he wrote, and had ‘left a stain of pessimism on the Irish character.’ Even a century later, we had not recovered from the shock of near obliteration. ‘The memory of it is still somewhere in the whorls of our minds. Without being conscious of it many Irish people are afraid to marry and have children without an assurance of material prosperity which more buoyant peoples do not require.’
Yet, records indicate that Ireland’s fertility at that time was 3.4 — 2.5 times what it is now, when we appear not even to consider the possibility that we may be facing a crisis of demographics or survival.
In The Vanishing Irish, the writer Seán O’Casey was quoted on his fear that Ireland in 1953 was ‘withering’: ‘We’ve spread ourselves over the wide world, and left our own sweet land thin.’
The warnings on that occasion were heeded, and within two decades the fertility rate had climbed to nearly 4.
But traces of the conditions that O’Casey, Sheridan and the others adverted to may still be with us, albeit manifesting in a different, more lethal fashion. The zeal for abortion must surely be regarded as one such manifestation, but also the silence that has met the inundation of Ireland over the past two decades with what are insultingly termed ‘the new Irish’ — alleged refugees, asylum seekers and others who have come here as part of a wave of displacement now occurring on a global basis.
The English writer Douglas Murray’s 2018 book The Strange Death of Europe — in a remarkable echo of the most localised rumination of John D. Sheridan nearly six decades before — observes that ‘Europe is committing suicide.’
‘Or at least,’ Murray continues, ‘its leaders have decided to commit suicide. . . I mean that the civilisation we know as Europe is in the process of committing suicide and that neither Britain nor any other Western European country can avoid that fate because we all appear to suffer from the same symptoms and maladies. As a result, by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.’
This is the core of it: the loss of our home. Whereas the vast majority of those who come here to Europe, Ireland, will continue to have another place — their home country — to return to should they wish, we, the native Irish, will have nowhere to go in the event that our country becomes unliveable. The symptoms that in the 1950s were, in comparative terms, somewhat mysteriously attributed to a country with a fertility rate of 3.4, are now afflicting the entire continent.
Murray goes on: ‘Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument. Those in power seem persuaded that it would not matter if the people and culture of Europe were lost to the world. Some have clearly decided (as Bertolt Brecht wrote in his 1953 poem The Solution) to ‘dissolve the people and elect another . . .’
Murray identifies two main causes for Europe’s drastic situation. One is mass migration into Europe, which he says turned Europe from ‘a home for the European peoples’ to ‘a home for the entire world.’ The lack of integration or assimilation has turned innumerable places in Europe into places that are no longer European in the any sense. As Murray points out, no European can go to China and begin calling himself Chinese: only Europe extends this as an unquestionable entitlement.
Murray sombrely describes this complicity by Europeans in the destruction of their own beliefs, traditions and legitimacy. We Europeans have forgotten that everything we love — ‘even the greatest and most cultured civilisations in history, can be swept away by people who are unworthy of them.’ He has in mind those among us who insist that European culture must roll over to give space to the incoming cultures. The myth of progress is used, he says, to blinker the people of Europe to the calamity unfolding in their midst. Europe is weighed down with guilt about its past, which paralyses even those who are blameless. And there is also, he says, a problem in Europe of ‘existential tiredness and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin’ — the condition that John D. Sheridan, writing of Ireland 1953, called ‘racial despair’.
To reach this appalling pass, we destroyed a culture of strong beliefs in transcendent ideas and ideals, an ancient tradition based on philosophy, ethics and the rule of law, replacing it with a shallow anti-culture based on spurious strains of ‘respect’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ — trite concepts with no effective meaning in this context other than a denial of the right of members of the host cultures to speak their minds in the face of their potential obliteration.
Whereas those we somewhat laughably call our leaders insist that we treat the newcomers — the ‘new Irish’ with forbearance, respecting their different cultures, rights and demands — we, the host culture, are required to stand down our beliefs, culture, traditions and allegiances. Crucifixes must be removed from public spaces; prayers must be replaced with mindfulness sessions.
The loss of unifying stories, says Murray, ‘about our past and ideas about what to do with our present or future’, would be a serious conundrum at any time. During a time of momentous societal change and upheaval, such a loss is likely to prove fatal. ‘The world is coming into Europe at a time when Europe has lost sight of what it is. And while the movement of millions of people from other cultures into a strong and assertive culture might have worked, the movement of millions of people into a guilty, jaded and dying culture cannot.’
We stand, then, to lose our home, the home of our children, the Irish generations as yet unborn. Already weakened by a history of occupation, genocide and forcible cultural reconstruction, we have lacked the clarity and courage to defend our sweet land, its ways, laws and culture. We have allowed ourselves to be bullied into self-destruction by people who clearly have no love for Ireland or its people, who do not care if Ireland per se survives or not, who lives in Ireland or calls it home — provided they can ensure their own immediate futures and the success of their ideological projects. Seventy years ago, the Irish were afraid to marry; now they are afraid to open their beaks. Irishness is already the hole in the doughnut in Ireland, as self-assertive ‘new Irish’ move in to take the prizes promised them by people without a mandate to do so, the same bully-boys and bully-girls who seek to drown out or intimidate into silence those who dare to stand and ask a question about what is happening.
One of the sad realities of the present moment is the extent to which many young people, including most millennials, appear no longer to be convinced, or to care one way or the other, that foundational civilisational values are ipso facto indispensable if freedom is to be preserved. In the constitutional context, for example, no longer is it adequate that one simply says, in seeking to persuade some such person, ‘This is an incursion on basic rights of free speech’ (and/or the right to free assembly). If you try this you will be met with blocking, obfuscating pedantries: ‘Free speech isn’t absolute’; via ‘I’m not really interested in the Constitution — it’s a hundred years old’ (84 and counting, actually) ratcheting down to ’Well, I don’t really care anyway.’
At best, in the face of this barrage of ‘Who cares? and ‘So what?’s, you will be forced to go back to first principles, as though the arguments had never before been made, never mind won, in order to have even a chance of persuading your audience that free speech is not like turning on a tap, but actually a cornerstone of democracy, that what exists by way of freedom is not a naturalistic phenomenon but something preserved by the free flow of information and opinion in much the way that, I dunno (thinking from the waist down), a box of fish fingers is preserved by the ice in the freezer in which they are stored.
There is nothing free about saying what everyone thinks they know. This indeed, may be the very antithesis of freedom, since the more people are recruited to believe something, the less opportunity this belief has to be tested in public, rendering it far more suspect than a belief held by only a minority of citizens. Consenters tend to ape, dissenters to authenticate.
Despite (because of?) our latter-day media saturation, we are a long, long way from the understandings spelled out by John Stuart Mill in his treatise On Liberty, published more than 160 years ago, a foundational document of our civilisation and perhaps the signature document on the connection between free speech, diversity of opinion, and freedom.
Mill’s main point was that all freedom depends on freedom of expression, and, to make freedom as secure and as broad as possible means allowing for the greatest tolerable amount of free speech.
‘If all mankind minus one were of one opinion,’ he wrote, ‘mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.’
Sometimes Mill seemed to be even more interested in arguing on behalf of those who speak in error, whose value in the protection of liberty he regarded as equal to that of those who speak truly. What he called the ‘peculiar evil’ of silencing the expression of an opinion was for him not simply a matter of disempowering ‘minorities’ or underclasses. He insisted that it was ‘robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation — those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it, of the potential understanding of even the most peripheral and eccentric view of an issue. ‘If the opinion is right,’ he argued, ‘they are deprived of the opportunity for exchanging error for truth; if it is wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.’
Many of the most ominous changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past two decades were effected without meaningful consultation with the Irish public, without a fair and balanced national conversation, indeed often with menaces directed at dissenters. For much of that time, we have been living in an echo chamber, our ‘national’ newspapers and broadcasters constantly giving platforms to the same opinions while marginalising and demonising others. The ‘hate speech’ laws represent the final removal of the Irish larynx.
Though it is late in the day, we need to find the courage to think aloud.
All the conditions described above have become exacerbated in the Time of Covid. In a strange way, the ‘hate speech’ Bill reads like a development rather than a precursor to this period, for it adopts an attitude of high-handedness to not only the rights of the people but the very idea that people might believe they are entitled to claim such things.
The disabling of the right to free speech is a critical milestone along the way to outright tyranny. It is to literally place a gag on the mouths of the populace to match the emblem they have been wearing since July of last year. It amounts to the gagging of the host population in the face of their obliteration by a process of mass plantation.
It is difficult to see how, short of outright disaster, such a totalitarianism can be turned around. Even half-lies that have become axiomatic are difficult to unmask, so that exposing the absolute inversion of facts, principles and truth presents itself as an Herculean task, rendered all but hopeless by the relentless attrition of a literally mindless (there is no attempt at thought) celebrity culture seeking only the oral equivalent of T-shirt slogans.
This ‘hate speech’ measure is one of the final preparations for the introduction of a total oligarchy. The people to whom we entrust our country and our freedoms have betrayed us in a manner that remains dizzying to contemplate. They have handed us over to an ideological tyranny such as the West has never seen. All our lives, certainly those of most of us who have attained middle-age, have been reading and re-reading George Orwell with a mixture of complacency and condescension. What kind of societies, we mused, might give birth to such monstrosities? Not ours, surely! Even when alerted to the banal qualities of evil, we have tended to rest on the laurels of our freedoms and thanked our lucky stars that we are led by phlegmatic, shambling figures with no aspirations to put their boots on our faces. These events tell us that, in spite of all the lessons we might have learned from history, our understandings of evil remain more rudimentary than is good for us. In spite of all the warnings, we had succumbed again to thinking that inhumanity arises solely from visibly extreme ideologies of, for example, tribalism or from the actions of unusually pathological individuals, monsters with odd moustaches. No longer can we indulge in such smug certitudes. Now we see, through our front windows, the precise circumstance Orwell was warning of, as we slouch towards the new normal, the Great Reset, the New World Order, the dystopia we thought a figment of feverish novelistic imaginations.
What is happening on the immigration front has absolutely nothing to do with meeting the needs of the world’s dispossessed, and everything to do with ransacking and plundering the inheritance of the Irish People, that which they have a right to hold in trust for their children, so that this long-tortured, sweet land may become, yes, a soulless sand bank on which people, strangers to one another, move and shake, a ‘resource’ of the EU and the transnational corporate sector, a source of cheap labour and docile consumers, a retreat for multi-billionaire financiers and a holding centre for migrant-slaves who have been persuaded to abandon their homelands so that these too may be rendered amenable to the needs and wishes of the Combine.
Ireland is, or was, a separate civilisation, extending back millennia, long pre-dating Christianity, Catholic or Protestant. The idea — gaining increasing currency in these catchphrase-clotted days of a cloying progressivism — that, when historians look back, the Irish Republic that we have regarded as our home, will be ‘a blip on the historical radar’, assumes, contradictorily and rather naïvely, that there will be a historiography of all this, or in any event that it will be an Irish historiography. This becomes increasingly doubtful. If there has been a blip in Irish civilisation, it was in the centuries of occupation and dehumanisation, which interrupted this civilisation and — this remains to be seen — possibly truncated it, leading to the present suicidal phase that might have been avoided with a freer and more open conversation. Now, having survived 800 years of tyranny at the hands of near omnipotent vanquishers, we seem set to obliteration at the hands of the Omnipotent Victims being used by Cultural Marxist as human shields in their mission to cleanse the land of Ireland of its indigenous peoples. This may be the greatest crime in the whole of Irish history. Is it any wonder they are going to such lengths to prevent it being discussed and uncovered?
The future history of this island might be a history of an African diaspora, or a triumphalist account of the conquering by Islam of one of the oldest Christian islands in the world, or a BLM trophy story, or the ghosted autobiography of Bill Gates’s grandson. But whatever it may be, it becomes increasingly unlikely that it will be a continued history of an Irish, still less a Gaelic or Celtic people. The coming generations of inhabitants of this island may take this island back to prehistory, or else be the inhabitants of a prison island, inhabited by slaves who grow food for external elites, déjà vu all over again!; or the sleek and quiescent servants — returned to their own people’s pasts — of a new class of oligarchs, who see in this island a beauty that we, the natives were not able to perceive until it grew too late.
All this will arise from the failure to understand that we have for centuries been a nation under the cosh of a self-hatred imbued by a form of hypnosis. The same process that maintained us in servitude for centuries is on the march again, but this time around the screw is being tightened by our own people, on behalf of a new oligarchy that targets Ireland as part of a global onslaught on human freedom. It is history catching up on us, but very far from the terms of the accusations of the ‘new Irish’. Because we lived influenced by wind and sun and tree, and not by the passions and deeds of the past, we have become a thriftless and a hopeless people. Because we never paused to think about and diagnose the problem in its completeness, the pathology of national abnegation never went away.