An Ancestral Debt to Be Replaced? Ireland Owes the World Nothing

“[T]he issue at hand here is that Ireland is receiving immigrants in hope of a better life, not unlike millions of our own ancestors in the US, Latin America, Canada, Australia etc. It is our ancestral obligation to help those in need. Our home is theirs.” — @bilbosfootcomb

That the worst arguments are frequently the most fecund is a quality peculiar to our age. As in the marketplace of commodities, the lowest common denominator, possessing the dead weight of numbers on its side, holds sway in the marketplace of ideas.

This is most apparent when one surveys the arguments in favour of mass immigration and/or acceptance of what are, in the parlance of hegemony (media, academia, NGOs, Governmental departments, and so on), designated as refugees. Disputation of their status as genuine refugees is a trite point, admittedly, but aren’t cliches borne of truth?

An all to commonly trotted out apology for migration, and without doubt the most inane, is the contention that Ireland, a nation whose territory encompasses 7 million people, of whom there are already an onerously sizeable percentage of foreigners (including the Ulster-Scots, whose presence has plagued attempts to unify the Island), must welcome the world’s impoverished and destitute to its shores - this owes, they aver without even the semblance of critical thought or reflection, to our prodigious diaspora, a group purportedly “welcomed” by the nations of the earth.

The foregoing is a concoction of vile and suicidal misplaced sentimentality, misinferences, and mistruths. It must be refuted.

Let us dispel an ahistorical myth - the notion that the Irish were welcomed. Though Irish migration to American dates back (if one excludes Brendan the Navigator) to the mid 16th century, when Irishmen joined with Spanish colonists in the 1560s in Florida, it accelerated in the 19th century, reaching its apotheosis following An Gorta Mór.

The Irish, the majority of whom were Catholic Gaelic-speakers from the West of Ireland, found themselves in a hostile ecosystem; subjects of prejudice on grounds of alien tongue, religious affiliation, and memory of being antipodes to the protestant struggle against Popery and Jacobitism in the old world, the Irish had to struggle to navigate structures, the lexicon of which they could not even understand - there is a sociological, as well as, it goes without saying, linguistic dimension to this.

Derisive at first, the perfidious Yankees cynically later employed our alloyed stock as fodder against the Confederate States of America. Our welcome was marked with shackles in Australia, where our people subsisted as penal subjects in Van Diemen's Land. Meanwhile, in loyal Canada, the Irish had their language beaten out of them in an effort toward anglicised homogeneity. Such was the welcome (a vile lie, it must be reiterated) our people received.

Despite this, the Irish climbed the ranks in said loci, admittedly as an ethnic cartel via Tammany Hall in New York — nevertheless we ascended. Our people assumed posts as governors, prelates, union organisers, and other positions of note. In an ironic gesture incubated by time’s veil ‘til an apposite moment was chosen, the Irish would prove to be the most patriotic denizens of their new homes - it was us, along with Catholic Germans, who saw FDR for what he really was.

Following the “logic” of our opponents, should we mete out similar treatment to those flooding our shores? Of course not.

Notwithstanding the facticity of the above treatment at the hands of those our-contemporary shoneens construe as magnanimous and benign, the curious notions of a “national debt” and “obligations arising from history” ought to be scrutinised.

Whereas once, I would have prima facie dismissed such notions, a reflection upon nationality as shared, inherited consciousness in the course of history (qualified by our ethnic discreteness, of course) has imbued my conception of nationhood with a moral facet.

Put differently, a conscious subject, though connotative of freedom, is forced to be an evaluative agent - even in its rejection of this fate, by way of suicide, it makes a value judgement. That is, it acts normatively. It declaims that this - in the preceding sentence, as in the arguments of the shoneens of today, death rather than life - is the good. It acts morally, or what it perceives to be the moral course of action.

The nation, being the sum of millions of discrete consciousnesses - among whom there are varying shades, some dim, others illuminated, by nature, background, or choice - all of which are united by the inheritance of a nation in a higher unity, is subject, in terms of its future conduct, to the power of the personages who make up its substratum. This is not merely a question of interests, a polestar that previously guided my attitude toward the issue this essay tackles, but also morality.

How will future generations view us? Is is right to sell out our nation in the name of sentimental humanism? Is the perpetuation of our people morally right? What do we owe the past?

Our opponents believe they have the monopoly on morality. Ignorant of resting their contention upon a shaky, ahistorical basis, they are prideful in their conviction that their argumentative edifice is imperturbable. In reality, they have constructed a mechanical leviathan, the efficacy of which would lead to snuffing out the millennia-old tradition of Irish nationality. They have made a moral decision in favour of death, destruction, the pillaging of our generation’s honour, disregard for our ancestors, as well as other inverted values.

We do have a debt, and inasmuch as they posit this they are correct. But our debt is owed to victims of the Penal Laws, those scattered to every corner of this planet, and the starving masses left to starve by Westminster. In our choice to survive, conserve, thrive, and edify, we are not merely making decisions which rest upon interest - we are declaring our moral stance in favour of life, respect for our ancestors, memory, and passing on the gift of nationality. Phrased differently, the burden of our debt is this: to be Irishmen.

In closing this brief essay, remember this: our ancestors did not suffer so that we could throw away the gift of nationality.