The Cause of Ireland is the Cause Against Labour

“Only in otium and bellum is there nobility and honour:” so rang the voice of ancient prejudice!”

It was in 2017 when I first realised that I was “politically homeless”. Varadkar had launched his campaign to become leader of the ‘right wing’ party Fine Gael, claiming that he wanted to be a Taoiseach for “people who get up early in the morning”. He followed this with a campaign “Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All”. The interceding years have seen large sections of the right follow Varadkar down this path, through my involvement in right wing circles I’ve been subject to no shortage of Jordan-Peterson-style slop about the “meaning” that work supposedly enshrines in our lives, the “nobility of labour”. I didn’t leave the right – the right left me.

To be clear – no meaning, beauty, joy or nobility can be derived from anything thats purpose is sustaining mere life. The new right needs to move away from the fetid swamp that Varadkar has led us to and back to the clear and pure air of the right as our ancestors knew it – ‘Fénnid cách co trebad’ – ‘Every man is a Fenian until he takes up the plough’

Early accounts of by Anglo explorers in Ireland reveal the extent to which our ancestors went to free themselves from labour. As Spenser noted in ‘A View of the State of Ireland’:

“All the Irish, almost, boast themselves to be gentlemen no less than the Welsh; for if a man can derive himself from the head of any sept (as most of them can, being so expert through their bards), then he holdeth himself a gentleman, and thereupon scorneth to work or to use any hard labour, which, he saith, is the life of a peasant or churl. But thenceforth he becometh either a horse-boy or a stocah to some kern, ensuring himself to his weapon and to the gentlemanly trade of stealing (as they count it).”

Likewise, Anglo explorers in Gaelic Scotland wrote scornful accounts of the gendered division of labour, in which men excused themselves from work—except for hunting—and instead smoked and drank in glens while their women ploughed the fields. It has been suggested to me that this same scornful attitude was held by the English-speaking communities surrounding Ráth Chairn in the 1950s, when Irish-speaking migrants from Connemara continued to practice this division of labour, requiring the women to plough the fields.

While it’s heartening to hear such noble attitudes persisted in sections of Irish society as late as the 1950s, the death of such cultural practices, lies at the feet of the English. Left-wing revisionism of the conquest of Ireland has blurred the historical reality, that for the “churls” of Ireland, English conquest represented a legal, social and economic liberation from the Gaelic aristocracy. Much of the literature by the Gaelic aristocratic class following the collapse of the Gaelic Order, such as Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis, mocks the emerging native mercantile class for supporting English conquest in exchange for economic liberation. (The grindset and its consequences cost us Ireland)

For the Irish Right-winger today, we need to understand the bourgeois idealisation of work for what it is – a distasteful Anglo cultural import. Scratch the surface of England’s great philosophers – Locke, Bacon - and instead of anything profound you find what ultimately amounts to an economist. The extent to which this mercantile instinct consumes the English mind is absurd, James II justified religious tolerance on the grounds that ‘persecution was unfavourable to population and to trade”. The celebration of labour impoverishes the nation in its spiritual pursuits.

This is because the foundation of culture rests on the abolition of labour and great culture necessitates this freedom. The first event of any culture is when a class frees itself from the necessity labour. Historically, this has occurred by one people, normally a pastoral one, enslaving another, normally an agrarian one - the Tutsi and the Hutu, the Greeks and the Doulos, the Gael and Neolithic farmer. This dynamic gives rise to a regime that must justify itself through abstractions in the face of critics – ultimately producing a foundation for culture. Today we can achieve this through welfare fraud.

There is no better example of the corrosive impact of work-idealisation on the cultural life of a nation than England itself. As Sombart notes, what has England contributed to religion beyond the salvation army? Shelly and Byron were banished from England – both would later renounce their home country. The great writers of the English language are ultimately Irishmen, likewise with much of the great English musicians of the last century. As Dáibhí Ó Bruadair noted, the English mercantile class that came to Ireland following the collapse of the Gaelic Order, had spent more on one horse than they had on all the arts and culture in the hundreds of years they had been in Ireland.

It's deeply distressing to me to see Irish right-wingers celebrate Ireland ranking among the most productive workforces world-wide. This celebration of industriousness will come at the same cost of good taste. Something I have experienced first-hand. Upon completion of my degree, my job hunt was stifled by a persistent anxiety that a friend or a girl I liked would see me in the debased condition of employment, a distress intensified by right-wingers (and my parents) telling me to get a job. As Nietzsche noted work-idealisation ultimately demands a “moderation in joy”, which gives way to a suspicion of joy and ultimately joy itself becoming “need of recreation”.

Ulick Fitzhugh once remarked “We agree with Aristotle – all work is slavery. We agree with John Mitchell – The Irish should be slavers not slaves”. The first goal of any right-wing man must be to free himself from labour.

“Otium et bellum” – carve this into my tomb stone.