POOR IRELAND: Eire, We Hardly Knew Ye.
The land of this writer’s ancestors was once known the world over for its stubborn, centuries’ long refusal to submit to the religion and laws of the global empire next door. Nowadays it’s better known for its enthusiasm, its desperation even, for submitting to the religion and laws of another empire just a little further east, namely the European Union.
Perhaps you heard about the riots that took place in Dublin last month, which began as an expression of rage after an Algerian-born man (holding an Irish passport and thus an “Irishman”) attacked several children with a knife outside of their school, leaving one little girl in critical condition. The Irish people had already been on edge, after the conviction of a Roma gypsy from Slovakia named Jozef Puska for the senseless murder of Aishling Murphy, a young Irish woman, as she was jogging in her native County Offaly. Murphy’s boyfriend, in a victim impact statement given at the time of sentencing, angrily noted that Puska had “come to this country, [to] be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over 10 years [but could] never hold down a legitimate job and never once contributed to society in any way, shape, or form.”
His words were instantly censored by the country’s one-party state media outlets, but they reflected the frustration of many normal Irish men and women who have watched their country’s radical transformation at the hands of its current Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar and his Uniparty coalition government over these past several years. And just how radical has it been? Here are some numbers from Philip Pilkington, writing in UnHerd:
“A full 2.8 percent of the population is made up of people who have moved to Ireland only in the last year. This means that if you walk down the average Irish street, one in 35 people will be newcomers to the country. While Ireland had been accepting large numbers of migrants for a long time, this was turbocharged by the war in Ukraine. Ireland, whose political and media classes have become notably outward-looking over the past decade, wanted to prove its liberal values and committed to hosting huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees. On a per capita basis, Ireland accepted six times more refugees than Britain — and made almost no plans for how to accommodate them. The latest numbers show that Ireland’s foreign-born population is 904,800 people. This means that 18 percent of the Irish population is foreign-born.”
Pilkington argues that there is no nation known to history that has successfully assimilated this percentage of recent immigrants. And Ireland, which historically has been known for out-migration — hence the prevalence of number of “Mc” and “O” prefixed surnames throughout the Anglosphere — is unlikely to buck that trend.
Why has the Irish governing class, almost without exception, actively encouraged this transformation? In part it is because it associates Ireland itself with backwardness, and that includes its people — the Muintir na hÉireann, in the old language — whom they refer to as “boggers,” and “culchies,” and find terribly unsophisticated and embarrassing. This is their opportunity to, as Bertolt Brecht facetiously suggested, “dissolve the people” and replace it with another. Which is exactly what they’re doing.
Most countries in the West are governed by a ruling class that doesn’t much like the people it rules.