The Banshees Of The Irish Working Class

And: Ukraine's Betrayal, the 'Napoleon' Botch, Mary Harrington, & More

I wanted to send y’all an extra edition this week, in part because I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to write next week. The Diary goes on the road to Prague and Bratislava, where we will begin filming the Live Not By Lies documentary series, funded by Angel Studios and, well, you. Among the things we have lined up are a meeting in Kamila Bendova’s apartment, where Havel and the other leading dissidents used to gather back in the day; we will be meeting there some the last living members of the Charter 77 movement. Next week’s diaries might be really good … or I might not have time to write at length. We’ll see.

I especially wanted to share this letter that came from an American living in Dublin with his Irish wife. He agreed to let me print it here, if I didn’t name him:

Politicians and guards called the rioters "hooligans" and "thugs" with "far-right ideology." I don't think that's accurate. To call them far-right is to assume they have a dedicated political cause with a wider understanding of actual politics. These were opportunistic pillagers and anti-immigrant young men whose frustration with the government and their own living conditions finally burst when they learned the man who stabbed five people—including two children—was a foreigner. (Reports are saying he's originally from Algeria and has lived in Dublin for 20 years.)

Context is necessary here. 

The north side of Dublin is a rough area. Violent crime, gangs and cocaine. Just this summer, an American tourist was put in a coma after being beaten outside a pub for no reason. When Justice Minister Helen McEntee repeatedly says that Dublin is a safe city, everyone knows she's lying. 

Amid all this, Ireland has taken in a number of refugees and immigrants. From what I've learned over the years, and from what I've picked up these few months, the Ukrainians are welcome. They're nearly all women and children with their husbands and fathers fighting back home. Irish hospitality was shown to them. Rightly so. (However, I've heard that undocumented men from Georgia are coming in and claiming they're Ukrainian.) 

There's a sizable Polish population here, too, but they've assimilated really well. They're hardworking, family-oriented, and Catholic—or at least they come from a similar situation, that is, a nation steeped in Catholic history and culture. You never see them out at pubs. You never hear them causing trouble.

Historically, Ireland was homogeneous. Everyone was white. Your ancestors were all Christian of some kind. You inherited a faith, culture, and way of life—the good and the bad. It still is homogeneous, ethnically speaking, but that's changing.

Economically, Ireland's now a tough place to live, not just on the north side. A major housing shortage has driven up rents and mortgages. The war in Ukraine has driven up oil and energy costs. Folks with solid, steady jobs say they can't get a home. Granted, thanks to remote work, many people are moving west to rural Ireland where houses are more affordable. But just as many head for better opportunities in Australia, London, the U.S. and Canada. Some go for a few years. Many start new lives there.

So though I absolutely detest what happened in Dublin last night, I can understand how one gets that enraged. Fatherlessness. Drugs. Rising costs of living. Trauma. Legit trauma. All that combined with seeing foreigners and refugees getting government housing and sustenance. Granted, much of it is funded by the E.U., but still. 

Ireland doesn't have a formal far-right political party, and no far-right person has been elected to the Dáil or Seanad. I hope it stays that way. 

But the liberal agenda leads to this stuff, and far-right politicians come swooping in once it all hits the fan. Look at Argentina, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand. When common sense, a commitment to family values and reason go away, people will rage at what takes its place.

I truly pray what happened last night in Dublin never happens again. Time will tell.

Here is a link to a GBNews video report from Dublin, in which the correspondent explains that beneath Dublin’s modern, multicultural façade are a large number of white working class males who are unemployed or under-employed, and who believe that there is no hope for them. They see Ireland welcoming males their age from Africa and the Middle East with open arms, providing for them … and they’re mad. The correspondent points out, as the writer above does, that Ukrainians and other Europeans who migrate to Ireland manage to assimilate well, and don’t cause trouble. The Third World migrants … not so much. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going to happen in a situation like that.

Understand that I’m not siding entirely with the rioters. There is an explanation, but no excuse, for this violence. I believe it is really important to draw a sharp line between us and violence. It would be hypocritical to decry the violence the race rioters launched into American cities in 2020, but side with the Dublin rioters because I think their cause is more just.

Here is a link to my latest in The European Conservative, in which I discuss how Ireland’s ruling class creates a phantom “far right” menace to demonize the Irish working class and other “Deplorables” there, as a strategy of avoiding accountability for what it has done and is doing to that country. Excerpt:

What has happened in Ireland, with the importation in recent years of vast numbers of migrants under a government scheme, is a vivid example of what French thinker Rénaud Camus calls “the Great Replacement.”

In just the last 20 years, the population of Ireland has increased from four million to almost 5.3 million—a 30% increase in less than a single generation. Most of that is due to migration. For comparison, imagine if France in the same amount of time had added 20 million people to its population, or the United States welcomed 100 million to its shores. That would have been the equivalent of adding two and a half Californias, or almost three Texases, in only two decades.

That’s what Ireland is dealing with. In September, Alan Barrett, an Irish statistician, told the Irish Times that this “huge” population increase has something to do with both the housing crisis and the struggle of the country’s healthcare system.

“It’s very difficult for an economy to be building and absorbing that number of people in terms of housing, the bits of the economy that are difficult to throw up overnight,” Prof. Barrett said.

But see, it’s the phantom ‘far right’ that’s the problem here. Not the government, which has made the lives of ordinary Irish people much worse by taking in far more foreigners than Ireland can handle, especially foreigners whose cultural backgrounds make them far less able to assimilate. Not the media, who have minimized the problems caused by mass migration, and stigmatized those who complain as ‘racists.’ The ruling class in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, chooses to deflect blame for the problems its own migration policies have caused by faulting the so-called far right for noticing, and slamming complaints as ‘conspiracy theories.’

Renaud Camus says the Great Replacement is not a conspiracy theory, but a simple fact. Radical transformation of European societies via mass migration did not require a conspiracy, he says. It’s what happened over the past six decades as a succession of governments, of both the Left and the Right, for reasons both of culture and economy, opened the floodgates to the Third World.

Brian Kaller, writing from Dublin, says that as far as he knows, Ireland doesn’t have a far right, but the way the government is handling the migration issue is an excellent way to make one appear. True. If regular politicians refuse to listen to the needs and concerns of the people, and to take them seriously, then the people will turn to those who will. If it’s “far right” not to want your country overrun by foreigners, especially those who can’t or won’t assimilate, and to refuse to reconcile yourself to the fact that native-born people suffer from a lack of housing and jobs while these foreigners receive government benefits, and to not want women and children menaced by these anti-social young men on the street … well, sure, you’re going to get a “far right”.

Here is the taoiseach, or prime minister, of Ireland, a gay man of Indian heritage, saying that the indigenous people, whose ancestors never colonized anybody or practiced racial discrimination, nevertheless have to pay reparations for the privilege of being white. Link to video here:

These ruling class idiots actually believe that all white people are just like the guilt-ridden liberals and conservative wets they surround themselves with — middle and upper class people who hate themselves and their own kind (but who of course would never resign their own plum job to make way for a sacred minority; rather, they want to outsource their penitence by preventing some white person further down the ladder from climbing up).

I began this comment by saying that I condemn the rioting. I stand by that as a matter of principle, but to that point, let me offer a comment from X, posted on the night of the riots by an Irishman named John McGuirk:

Some thoughts on the day's events, if I may:

When thousands of people protested peacefully in East Wall, and in other communities across Dublin and the country, their reward was not to be recognised or engaged with for their peaceful political participation. Their reward was rather to be called far right, deplorable, and the dregs of Irish society. The thing against which they protested happened anyway.

When peaceful mothers and women said, on camera, that they feared for their safety as a result of an influx of immigrant men, often into communities with no amenities for those men, their reward was to be accused of fearmongering. There are those, clutching for a gotcha, who will say something like "aha, but today's suspect/person of interest is a naturalised Irish citizen". But does it speak well of an immigration system that naturalises people capable (allegedly) of such acts? Does that inspire confidence, or does it sound like patronising nonsense?

There are those who sincerely believe, apparently, that the duty of media organisations is to suppress facts, like nationality, in order to maintain public order. But if the suppression of facts is required to maintain public order, then we have many bigger problems.

And we do. A huge section of people in this country feel as if they are unheard and their concerns ignored. 1,000 people marched in Rosslare at the weekend. Did you hear about it?

When Danny Healy Rae raised the case of Killarney this week in the Dáil, a colleague responded with a sweary tirade of abuse. Is this democracy?

When a young man, last week, linked the murder of his beloved girlfriend to Ireland's immigration policies, the media dutifully left that bit out of their coverage.

Every single effort has been made to silence people. Today, they made themselves heard. I wish they had chosen another way. And then I remember:

They did. And you all refused to listen.

Back in 2019, when I went to Ireland for the first time, a taxi driver was taking me from my Dublin hotel to the airport before dawn. We got to talking about the Yellow Vest protests then underway in France. This man, with a thick working-class brogue, said he wishes there were an Irish Yellow Vests, because he would join them. I asked him why. As I recall, he wasn’t very articulate in terms of defining his grievances, but he was volcanically forceful in expressing his hatred of the Irish ruling elites.

The thing Americans need to understand is that Ireland, for historical reasons, does not have a left vs right political system, as other Western countries do. I was arguing with a left-wing American friend yesterday about the Irish protests, which he insisted had to be a manifestation of the far right. I kept trying to explain to him that you can’t impose American political categories on Ireland, but he wouldn’t listen. He was too committed to his faith-based conviction that this was the far right at work. He could not admit new data that contradicted, or even complicated, the framework he used to understand the world. He is an American leftist who cares more about African migrants in Ireland than he does about the white Irish working class. The facts on the ground don’t matter to him; only Narrative does.

People like that are going to get poleaxed by history. They always do. Alexandra, the last Romanov empress, believed to the end that the Russian people were with the tsar. America is full of normie conservative Christians who think we are only one or two elections away from restoration, or who at least believe that everything will come right again if they only keep believing.

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