A Letter to the Editor – On the Status of Ireland’s National Cause — Some Disturbing Truths

Dear Editor,

It has been some time since I wrote to your publication. I write today, not to belittle or poke-fun-at your readership. Rather, I wish to burst the bubble—so to speak—on a number of uncomfortable truths which the right-nationalist cause in Ireland must confront. Hence, this letter is intended a message to the national movement writ large.

The subjects on which I write to you include; firstly a question as to the exact purpose of the national cause; secondly, the pervasive disregard as to the status of the Ulster-Irish; and thirdly, the profound dearth of political seriousness or earnest inspiration to forge a tangible future for this country amongst its so-called “nationalist” cohort.

These disturbing truths, it is hoped, will stimulate a deeper—and frankly, sincere—introspectiveness amongst those wayward minds who populate the national movement. After celebrating the centenaries of our Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War, we are prompted to aspire further than bugle calls or heartfelt emotions.

The motive that inspired the nationalists of yester-year was the creation of an independent Irish nation-state.  However, those goals have since been achieved—we have a Republic.

My first contention then, is whether today’s nationalists have the creativity required to infuse new meaning into the national cause; or will they continue to read books published in another era, debate twentieth-century ideas, and circumscribe themselves to a world-view that is now a hundred years out-of-date?

Mumbling modern patriots profess deportations, remigration, the protection of éiRe, and the establishment of a mystical Gaelstát, as their ultimate aims. Yet these ideas reflect a thought process which has allowed itself to drift from the realm of actionable might, towards an—at times delusional—imaginative day-dream from which its proponents would rather never wake.

To rectify these mores—a total and full reconsideration is required of; what the Irish nation’s purpose is on the stage of history; how will it achieve its aspirations; why are they justified—and when will they be achieved!

Such questions, were the average patriot to answer them, might conclude that Ireland’s cause is—as it always were—to become “a nation once again” and render Partition to an end, revive the Irish language or reverse the rising tide of migration to our country.

This is simply not sufficient. Nationalists must determine precisely: what is the raison d'être of the Emerald Isle? What is the worldly mission or spiritual cause to which our nation sets itself till kingdom come? It must not be a lazy intellectual simulacrum of ideas from ages past—nor one of idle “futurist” fantasising—but a motion which brings Ireland’s past to its present.

The second criticism I must raise with your readership, is their bizarre adherence to historical revisionism, a strain of thought which was in fact responsible for the liberalisation of Irish society. The revisionists—I must remind you—justified Partition based on an ahistorical idea that the Ulster-Irish somehow constituted a separate national community on our island.

These liberal revisionist historians have done much damage to Ireland’s national consciousness since their hay-days in the 1970s and 1980s, by providing the rationale that religious conflict in Northern Ireland was in actuality an ethnic dispute. Conveniently for the United Kingdom, this largely Protestant grouping historians who composed the “two nations theory” transformed our understanding of Irish anthropology from an understanding of religious differences, towards a narrative of perpetual ethnic rivalry. The propagation of this narrative pushed liberalisation, secularisation, and today, multiculturalism, as the only mediums to resolve such a challenge as national unification.

In pursuing this old mode of thought—you strangely accept the shoneenism of the Dudley Edwards family and their peers as a historical fact. Consequently, you are placed vis-à-vis Ulster-Irish Protestants, against Tone, Pearse, and Mitchel, standing alongside the Irish sophists: Moody, Lyons, and Foster. Though our dear paper patriots may quote Pearse, or pretend to have read Mitchel’s Jail Journal—they still circumscribe themselves to an ethnic-based narrative of Partition that contradicts the historical record. Would your readers be so foolish as to deny the Irishness of Ulster-Irish patriots? Would they cast Mitchel, Casement, and the United Irishmen out of Ireland’s nationalist pantheon?

There is a remarkably simple summary of Irish nationality that was politely given to this country by one of its most esteemed patriots— “Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter”—which in the terms of niche ethnic sub-categories your audience is so salivated by, translates as Gaelic-Irish, Anglo-Irish, and Ulster-Irish. The simplicity of this formula is quite refreshing to the ordinary person, who quite rightly gawks in disgust at the obsessive phrenological debates which pollute your internet community.

Thirdly, I must express my abhorrence towards the calibre of persons which have dominated your cause in recent years, people who lend much credence to the idea that right-wing politics is the natural home of individuals with disturbed personal lives.

Nowhere is this more present than the social media space, where anonymous and public accounts project a veil of competency only to mask profoundly warped personalities and delusions of grandeur. Meanwhile, the real-world is marred by internecine ego-battles and the assumption of unearned authority. It does not appear the case that nationalists cannot work together, but rather that they do not want to, or in some instances hold an aversion to action altogether.

The mythologising of the Irish Right is quite a pressing problem. There is a humourous cognitive dissonance that these same wasteful media moguls laud the “successes” of the “Gaelstát” and “the lads” behind “the movement” despite the blatant, frequent failures of Irish nationalists to find their footing. Do they not recognise the very nation which they purport to represent, finds their ideas and conduct unnerving?

It may be the case that such people who pre-emptively celebrate the successes of a dead-end movement, are engaging in mere escapism. Whereas other choose movies, television shows, or books as their methods of escape from the modern world, numb-nut nationalists clearly hold such a relationship with their fabled Gaelstát—that is, they would rather opine on the inevitability of a non-existent movement than confront responsibility.

Pontification on social media ought to be shunned. Foolish souls pretending as if they were scholars, living in a perpetual state of rest, never contributing an ounce of energy towards the cause to which they pledge fealty. These people, quick to discredit the some-times out-of-hand behaviour of “boomers” are themselves the problem, for they are net-zero contributors to Ireland’s cause.

It is no-doubt that populist sentiment is brewing across Ireland, yet a failure to build solid, real foundations, upon this ground will send nationalism burning like a firecracker, it may receive a sudden surge in support, yet it will absolutely fizzle out, and one-day remembered as nought but a fanciful light-show.

The Irish Right must abandon its hubris and embrace normalcy. To put it other words, if you think you’re being clever or that you know more than somebody else, playing a grand game of interdimensional chess against a nameless demiurge whom only your movement, or your ideas can defeat—you’re actually retarded.

The lack of political strategy amongst Irish right-wingers ought to be humiliating, “one-step forward, two-steps back” is a light criticism. For every achievement, the same people have by choice hampered their own growth or appealability to the public.

To conclude—there will be no Gaelstát, nor will there be an Irish Caesar. No hero is coming to your rescue, and the Ceannairí must be sent to the dust-bin. Whatever is made, will be a product of man, and nationalists are kindly reminded to remember that man is a fickle, arbitrary creature. Conspiracy must be abandoned, and accepting that ourselves alone are at fault for the present failures at hand is a necessary pre-condition to moving on to something more constructive.

There must be a future for this country. Not one driven by fairy-tales and aesthetic whims. Not only might, but right must be paramount. A nation is only valuable in-so-far as it subscribes itself to inalienable values which push it to advance. Whatever Ireland’s future might be, it will certainly not be the plastered patriotism of the right today.

Yours sincerely,

Edmund Spenser.

Donnybrook, County Dublin, July 28th, 2025.

Previous
Previous

The Death of the Gael in National Governance

Next
Next

Ireland's Epstein Ring?: A History of the Monto, Dublin’s Red Light District