The Irish Elite Are Terrifyingly Out of Touch

For the average member of the Irish political, media and NGO complex there are several political issues in Ireland which need to be addressed urgently. There is the burning need to introduce more stringent hate speech laws, a topic which seemed dormant until Taoiseach Simon Harris resurrected this prospect last week. There is the race to institute even more regulations which will help Ireland show the rest of the world how to tackle climate change. Inevitably, ever since Ireland joined forces with Norway and Spain in recognising Palestinian statehood back in May, there is the urgent need to show the Irish are on the ‘right side of history’. And the importance of continuing to show other, less enlightened, countries such as the UK and the US how international diplomacy should be conducted.

And, then of course, there is the pressing need to tackle the ever-present threat of the far right, a problem which seems to grow larger ever day – in the minds of Irish politicians, at least.

Indeed, recently speaking at the annual commemoration for Michael Collins, who was ambushed and killed during the Irish Civil war in Beal na Blath in Cork, Harris used the opportunity to condemn those who ‘would stoke hate and division’ and warned that ‘hate and violence have become responses to difficult situations.’

Warming to his theme, he  added that, ‘misinformation and lies are the greatest threat to democracy and peace in our time. Nowhere is that more evident than in the area of migration. There is a group of people who want a country whose history has been woven by mass emigration to diminish the value of migration.’

Of course, the locals in working class, urban and rural areas such as Coolock, Dundrum and countless other towns and estates across Ireland which have been forced to accept large numbers of asylum seekers without any prior consultation may struggle to see the value the Taoiseach is talking about. Harris finished his address by urging the people of Ireland to call out racism and to denounce those who ‘would wave the flag and claim patriotism.’

You would think that if politicians such as Harris, and the numerous NGOs who enjoy lavish government funding, are so concerned about the apparently inexorable rise of the far-right, along with climate change and the Middle East, they must be reflecting the attitudes of the average Irish voter.

But that appears not be the case. Because in an opinion poll published this week by Ipsos and the Irish Times into what has been grabbing the attention of Irish voters in the month of August, there was absolutely no mention of the far-right bogeyman at all.

There was however, plenty of attention given to the untrammelled rise of immigration and the failure of the government to handle this ever escalating mess. In fact, immigration topped the list of voter concerns, with 21 per cent stating that immigration was their biggest worry.

Coming in a close second was the issue of housing, at 19 per cent. Of course, the fact that these two issues are inextricably linked in the minds of most people is no coincidence. Despite the establishment’s increasingly frantic insistence that they have nothing to do with each other, the average punter can see the truth with their own eyes. The equation is a simple one: greater demand leads to less supply. And that incontrovertible reality is currently being played out in every county in the Republic, regardless of what the elites would have everyone else believe.

The fact that immigration and housing are the two top  burning issues for Irish people should have been obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. But the topics which garnered the least interest will have caused much gnashing of teeth and anguish in the corridors of Leinster House.

Despite all the Irish politicians boasting about our proud of our record of being world leaders in recognising Palestinian statehood, only a paltry 2 per cent of voters listed Gaza as a concern.

In other words, despite the Irish media constantly focusing on the war in Gaza in a typically unbalanced fashion and numerous heart rending speeches from the floor of the Dail, it would appear that most Irish people don’t really care one way or the other about Palestine.

Incredibly, it turns out most normal people have more pressing issues on their mind than an intractable, never ending conflict thousands of miles away. Instead, they are focused on the things that really matter to them.

Joining the Palestinian issue on 2 per cent in the list of things that people really don’t care about is climate change, a result which will cause even greater rancour than our apparent indifference to the war in Gaza.

Again, just like the Middle East, climate change has become one of those issues in which the great and the good of the Irish establishment like to think we can become world leaders and show everyone else how it’s done. But, just like every other issue which involves ordinary Irish people, they have got it completely wrong.

The 'Far Right' Bogeyman

There is something undeniably hilarious about the vast gulf between the issues which energise the middle class, liberal intelligentsia and the average working stiff on the street. But this growing disconnect between the voters and the people they vote for is sobering as well. There has been a near total failure of the establishment to understand the issues which are of genuine concern to real people, as opposed to the issues they think people should be obsessing over.

It’s yet another example – and one which seems to be increasingly common across the UK and the rest of Europe – of a technocratic elite being completely out of touch. Not only are politicians failing to understand the entirely legitimate fears and concerns of ordinary people, but they regard those entirely legitimate fears and concerns with something approaching complete contempt.

Simply put, they have created a gaping vacuum of trust between voters and politicians.

They will have nobody to blame but themselves to blame if that vacuum is filled by the genuine far-right and not just people who have honest fears about where this country is heading.  

A False Equivalence

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears”, wrote George Orwell in 1984. “It was their final, most essential command.” With such an injunction toward common sense empiricism in mind, we might remind ourselves that an Algerian man stabbed three children and their brave carer outside a school in Dublin last year.

This occurred November 23rd 2023 and preceded a protest which, unfortunately, became a riot. The initial act of barbarism was almost forgotten as Ireland’s elite embraced a hysterical focus on the supposedly central role that the “far right” played in causing chaos in our capital. And in the recent aftermath of a Rwandan-origin 17 year old knifing three little girls to death and injuring 10 in Southport, a similarly blinkered focus on the “far right” seems to have occurred in what is being described by some as a “two-tier” Britain.

According to a Sunday Times cover article from December 3rd 2023, “Violent far right extremists pose the biggest threat to the security of the state and to public safety, senior gardai warned last night.” And in the Sunday Independent’s Ireland Thinks poll published the same day, 19% of respondents viewed the rise of the “far right” as one of their top two concerns for Ireland.

“The influence of the far-right is growing in Ireland, a new study analysing online platforms has found.” So wrote the Irish Independent on November 20th, three days before the Algerian attacked three  children outside a school in Dublin. The article drew on a study about the “far-right”, carried out by an organisation called the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).

Not mentioned in the piece, is that Michael Shellenberger of the University of Austin and Public has testified to the United States House of Representatives about the ISD being part of what he calls the Censorship Industrial Complex. “As we uncover all the elements of the Censorship Industrial Complex and observe its ongoing attempts to expand global censorship,” wrote Alex Gutentag for Public, “it appears increasingly likely that this Complex aims to undermine and denigrate populist actors and movements through allegations that anti-government sentiment is linked to hate, conspiracy theories, or Russia.”

But what is the “far right”? Well, our Justice Minister, Helen McEntee, “is not sure there is a definition”. Perhaps such an ambiguous term is, from a Machiavellian sense, quite useful to the regime. “Far right” is such a broad umbrella term that, according to Party usage, it apparently includes everyone from the nearly-assassinated Robert Fico of Slovakia’s social-democratic Smer party, to mass murderers like Anders Breivik.

And it is here, in the very fact that Breivik came to my mind as an example of a “far right” terrorist, that a question arises: why do we know his name and not the names of other terrorists who aren’t “far right”?

Readers may remember that, in 2011, Breivik went on a rampage in Norway killing 77 people. Yet how many similarly informed readers know any names of the four men who carried out the 7/7 attack in London which killed 52 and injured 700? Or the two men who butchered a soldier named Lee Rigby in 2013? Or the two men who murdered 12 people and injured 11 at Charlie Hebdo in 2015? Or the man who murdered 49 people and injured 53 at the Pulse gay club in Florida in 2016? Or the man who beheaded a French teacher named Samuel Paty in 2020 for showing a cartoon? Or the man who murdered an MP named Sir David Amess in 2021? Or the man who murdered another French teacher in 2023? Or the man who stabbed a policeman to death and injured 5 at an anti-Islam event in Mannheim in June 2024?

Not only does the number of high profile terror attacks from which I could draw go on and on (and on and on…), there have been tens of thousands of lower profile attacks. According to French researchers:

“[W]e can establish that between 1979 and May 2021, at least 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks took place worldwide. They caused the deaths of at least 210,138 people. . . . Within the European Union, France was the country most affected, with at least 82 Islamist attacks and 332 deaths.”

This can’t continue: something has to give. Marine Le Pen’s supposed “far right” party, after all, got 38% of the votes in recent French elections; significantly more than any other party in Europe’s jihad capital. But as the above illustrates, Islamist violence isn’t just a major problem in France. In her essay from May 2024, Islamism & the “Far Right:” a False Equivalence, Ayaan Hirsi Ali provides the following data on the UK:

“According to the 2023 CONTEST Report, the primary domestic terrorist threat comes from Islamism, which “accounts for approximately 67% of attacks since 2018, about three quarters of MI5 caseload and 64% of those in custody for terrorism-connected offenses.” It also accounts for 80% of the Counter Terrorism Police’s live investigations. A similar picture is evident on the Continent, where Europol’s director said in 2023 that “Islamist terrorism remains the biggest terror threat to Western Europe.”

By contrast, what CONTEST calls Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism “amounts to approximately 22% of attacks since 2018, about a quarter of MI5 caseload and 28% of those in custody for terrorism-connected offences.” Overall, far right terror attacks in the UK so far this century have resulted in 3 fatalities and 10 injuries compared to 94 fatalities and 1819 injuries from Islamist ones. Three dead is three too many, but it is hardly equal to the threat of Islamism.

Proportionately, these figures are even more striking given that Islamists must look for their support among a Muslim population amounting to 6.5% of the UK total, whereas the Far Right can in principle address its message to a white population representing 80%.  It is a threat which can also draw succor from the fact a sizeable plurality of British Muslims candidly tell us they would prefer to live under Sharia law rather than integrate fully into British life and a significant minority of tens of thousands say they admire organisations like Al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight the West. Not unrelatedly, the 43,000 Islamists on the MI5 watchlist represent about 1% of the entire Muslim population of the country.”

The Real Threat

It is quite apparent that the Gardaí, as shown by recent clashes with protestors in Newtownmountkennedy and Coolock, are being deployed as a battering ram to force through reckless immigration policy against the wishes of the local populace. Moreover, as England’s “grooming gang” scandal, and crime statistics from neighbours such as Germany, Denmark and Sweden clearly show, Gardaí may be being used to force through immigration policies which are destined to make their own jobs far more difficult. And, as illustrated by the fact that the aforementioned Mannheim attack was just one of many Islamist knife attacks in recent memory — and only one of the roughly 50,000 Islamist attacks worldwide since 1979 — policing in Ireland appears to be on a collision course with increasing Islamist violence. Yet despite all this, we are relentlessly warned by the regime about the “far right”. Ben Scallan has provided some fascinating Europol data to offer perspective on this blinkered obsession of the Party and its obedient apparatchiks:

“Well, when you go back over a decade or so of Europol terrorism reports, between 2012 and 2022, you find that around 81.1% of terrorism arrests in the Republic of Ireland involve “separatists” – i.e. far-left Dissident Republicans, as previously explained. Meanwhile 13.2% are jihadists, 3.8% are “not specified”, and a measly 1.9% are classified as “rightwing”.

Now, clearly, all extremism is appalling and unacceptable. But with Europol telling us that 81% of Irish terrorism arrests over the last decade or so were Leftwing Socialist dissidents, while just 1.9% were on the Right, it’s worth asking if our emphasis is in the wrong place.

It should go without saying that all violent radicalism needs to be cracked down on, regardless of ideology. But if people insist on making it a “Left vs. Right” thing, it just so happens that the data clearly demonstrates that Ireland has a much bigger Leftwing extremism problem than Rightwing one – that’s just a cold, hard, statistical fact. Yet we spend all of our time talking about one side, and almost no time talking about the other, for reasons which are best known to the powers-that-be.”

Ordering Gardaí to assist in forcing individuals without cultural connection into Irish communities is obviously not in the interests of public safety or social cohesion, especially if these individuals are 70% male. Yet for whatever reason – whether simple ignorance, naïve well wishing, or a fear of being labelled “far right” – the public have yet to open any serious discussion of the real implications of our bizarre choice to follow a path which many European neighbours are now seeking to reverse.

Hopefully, Ireland can learn from the mistakes of our neighbours, and reverse course like Sweden, and avoid the same sort of disorder. However, as I noted in Gript prior to June’s elections, “I worry that conditions have still not gotten bad enough for Irish people to drive necessarily radical change”.

The Strange Death of Ireland

Sadly, Ireland’s situation looks to get much worse. Thanks to the decision by our government to opt-in to the EU Migration Pact — a decision TD Mattie McGrath described as “the single biggest transfer of sovereignty in the history” of our State — Ireland will lose further control over immigration. Unelected and unaccountable eurocrats will tell our State how many migrants we must take, or how much of a fine we must pay for refusing to comply.

Why would our government choose to accept a “new normal” of between twenty five and thirty thousand asylum seekers coming to Ireland each year? For a whole host of reasons – including what was arguably “misinformation” fed to us by the government in a referendum campaign that, if it had been successful, “might have undermined the ability of the State to operate an effective immigration system” – fully benevolent humanitarian motivations are no longer as plausible as they once might have been. And so is it, as a pre-2016 Bernie Sanders or economic nationalist might suggest, happening in order to flood the market with cheap labour that undercuts the indigenous working class, all to the benefit of Big Capital?

Might it really be the case that the Lifestyle Left — champagne socialists who care more about satisfying the latest woke fad than helping poor people — have simply teamed up with a similarly de-nationalised Globalist Right who care more about gaining access to cheap labour than their nation’s future? I honestly struggle to understand why they are creating, what I have termed, with unapologetic provocation, The Strange Death of Ireland.

This hysteric focus on the “far right” at the expense of objectively more pressing threats seems almost too warped to be real. But alas, it is. And so, let’s take Orwell’s warning seriously and ignore the Party’s propaganda, not our common sense eyes and ears.