The Strange Death of Ireland
Ireland is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the Irish people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.
The “far right” are apparently entirely to blame for causing wreck in Dublin on November 23rd 2023. Furthermore, the “far right” are supposedly also to blame for stoking immigration concern more broadly in Ireland. Or so our kindly betters relentlessly insist.
According to a Sunday Times cover article from December 3rd, “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 view the rise of the "far right" as one of their top two concerns for Ireland.
The Dublin riot saw millions of euro worth of damage and looting as well as horrible assaults on Gardaí. This social breakdown caused shock across the Western world where Dublin is more typically associated with Guinness and the Book of Kells than fiery carnage. To those who have noticed the increase in violent street crime there in recent years, however, seeing such chaos and destruction is actually less surprising than seeing the blame being placed entirely at the feet of “far right” political ideology.
Sure, there may have been some lads rioting for primarily political reasons, but non-political violence has been a problem in Dublin for some time. Notably, an American tourist, Stephen Termini, was savagely beaten by a gang during the summer of 2023 and ended up in a coma. Another noteworthy incident of non-political savagery occurred a few months before this. In March 2023, after a man was knocked to the ground and numerous individuals stomped on his head, “local Dublin city councillor Mannix Flynn said he was sad to see yet another incident of violence in the city”. Flynn is quoted further:
“This is no surprise. It’s commonplace in our streets. The behaviour of individuals is just outrageous. It’s violence and it should not be tolerated in any circumstances. … The city is hostile. Everyone will tell you the city is hostile. It’s a very changed place.”
Despite being argued long before November 23rd that there aren’t enough Gardaí in Dublin, and that the justice system has failed to deter anti-social behaviour, the recent riot is blamed on the “far right”. More bizarrely, the proposed solution to prevent further chaos of this sort is to ram through totalitarian “hate speech” laws which Helen Joyce of the Economist has described as “literally Orwellian” – the same kind of strategically ill-defined “hate speech” laws employed by the Soviet Union to persecute political dissent. The Irish Independent’s Ian O’Doherty seems to agree. O’Doherty straightforwardly described in The Spectator how this “completely bonkers” bill is “bad law with bad intentions” and how it “will have terrible consequences for Irish democracy and freedom.” Alas, this scapegoating of the “far right” as the root of all evil seems rather convenient for a Garda Commissioner who received a 98.7% vote of no confidence by the Garda Representative Association. And then, for a Justice Minister who “is not sure there is a definition” of the “far right” ideology supposedly causing havoc, one could be forgiven for suspecting that to be “far right” in today’s Ireland, is to be “Witch!” in centuries gone Salem.
“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, just days before a man reported to be Algerian stabbed 3 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 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.”
Psychological warfare aside, while 19% of those polled by the Sunday Independent not long after Dublin’s riot list the rise of the “far right” as one of their top two concerns, 24% of people still listed immigration. Further, immigration is up 9 points since the last poll, behind only cost of living at 30%, and housing at 45%. Moreover, 28% said they would now vote for a party with “strong anti-immigration views”, up 14% since September 2021.
So are 28% of Ireland now “far right”? Are we joining the many European nations increasingly backing immigration reform? These include the 23.7% of Dutch people who backed Geert Wilders, the 22% of Germans supporting the AfD, the French pushing Le Pen to presidency, the left-wing Danish state, the Italians who elected Meloni, the 23% of Swedes making Sweden Democrats the second most popular party, the 18% of Portuguese voters backing Chega, and the majority of Hungarians who keep electing Orbán.
The virtues of generosity and charity toward other peoples are admirable, but these virtues must be balanced against responsibilities of care and stewardship toward our own national collective and cultural heritage. Irish people are realizing this. In May of 2023, a Red C poll for The Business Post found that 75% of those polled agreed with the statement “I think the number of refugees Ireland is taking in is now too many”. Four possibilities spring to mind to help explain these two polls.
Firstly, Ireland’s population has increased 42% in just thirty years and one in five people here are now foreign born. This radical demographic shift is bound to have been noticed by the average person who, understandably, may experience concern about the pace of change.
Secondly, the 2019 election was largely fought over the housing crisis and a crumbling health system, and Irish people may be waking up to the material reality that taking in well in excess of a hundred thousand extra people per year is worsening these two issues.
Thirdly, even if many of our huge migrant intake were not mysteriously losing their documents upon arrival, or not being allowed to remain despite deportation orders, or not being bussed into secret accommodation in order to avoid local community backlash, a glaring truth remains: different cultures present different assimilation challenges. Irish people are not blind to these cultural differences. And when it comes to ease of absorption into Irish society, for example, there is an obvious difference between pro-Western Ukrainians fleeing a warzone, and low-skilled economic migrants from anti-Western cultures with very different attitudes toward physical violence, women’s rights, and secular liberal norms in general. “Gas the Jews” rang loud at Sydney Opera House after the rape and butchery of October 7th.
Finally, incidents involving non-natives occurred in the months prior to the poll published on December 3rd that will not have gone unnoticed.
In September 2023, an Angolan man, Kasonga Mbuyi, who had lived off state welfare for years, was charged with assault after a German tourist was repeatedly stabbed at Dublin Airport. The court reportedly heard that the random stabbing of the German tourist was “a cry for help” from a man “driven to despair” after being made homeless.
In October, an Iraqi man, Yousef Palani, was imprisoned for murdering two gay men in Sligo in April 2022, beheading one of them, and injuring a third. Palani was reported to have had a “kill list” of 12 gay men whom he intended to murder and, curiously, 250,000 euro in cash was found at his residence.
In November, a Slovakian man, Jozef Puska, who had received state welfare and housing for 10 years, was sentenced for murdering an Irish teacher, Ashling Murphy, in January 2022. Murphy was stabbed 11 times in the neck.
A week or so later, on November 23rd, a man reported to be Algerian stabbed 3 children and their brave carer outside a school. It was the stabbing of these children, aged 5 and 6, which preceded the riot in Dublin that night.
A few days later, at a full meeting of Limerick City and County Council on November 27th, Councillor Abul Kalam Azad Talukder, Limerick’s first ever Muslim Councillor, told the council chamber that “I’d like to see them shot in the head or bring the public in and beat them until they die”. He was initially understood to have been referring to the Irish rioters, yet later backtracked and claimed he was in fact referring to the Algerian stabber of the three children. And though I don’t agree with Councillor Talukder’s calls for execution via shooting or mob savagery, I tend to agree with his description of the rioters when he said “This is just some criminals looting the shops. I don’t think they follow any ideological purpose.”
Putting these few months in Ireland aside, let's now look at some events across Europe over roughly the same time period.
On October 13th, a teacher was “killed and two people seriously injured in a knife attack at a school in France. … Witnesses say he shouted "Allahu Akbar", or "God is greatest", during the attack. … The attacker, named as 20-year-old Russian national Mohamed Mogouchov, is of Chechen origin and known to security services for his involvement with Islamist extremism, according to police."
On October 16th, "a suspected Islamist terrorist shot dead two Swedish nationals and injured another when he went on a rampage in Brussels with an automatic rifle. The suspect, a 45-year-old Tunisian known as Abdesalem Al Guilani, posted videos online calling himself a fighter for Allah and ISIS."
By the end of October in Sweden, "there had been 48 deadly shootings this year in this country". "The Nordic country has gone from having one of the lowest levels of fatal shootings in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade. Well-established criminal gangs, largely run by second-generation immigrants, are no longer just killing eachother but increasingly relatives and … innocent bystanders." Brendan O’Neill described for Spiked how "In 2022 there were 90 bombings and 101 attempted bombings. … There were 391 shootings in 2022, 62 of them fatal, a rise from 45 fatal shootings in 2021. … There are now so many grenade attacks in Sweden that it's the only country outside of Mexico that keeps a record of them."
On Nov 18th, a 16 year old boy was stabbed to death and 16 others were injured after a gang of North African origin youths surrounded a village hall during a dance and were, according to one witness, "stabbing people blind". Gavin Mortimer described in the Spectator how a witness reported "their attackers had stormed the venue vowing to 'kill a white'."
By November 30th, it had been reported by German authorities they had foiled a terror plot. Two teenage boys reportedly planned to carry out a "fuel-induced explosion of a small truck" at a Christmas Market before fleeing to join an "offshoot of the so-called "Islamic State" group in Afghanistan."
And then on December 3rd, the very day Ireland’s two largest national newspapers told us how worried people are about the “far right”, a supporter of the Islamic State is alleged to have "fatally stabbed a German tourist near the Eiffel Tower. He then crossed to the other side of the River Seine, where he wounded two people with a hammer. As he was apprehended by police, he could be heard shouting 'Allahu Akbar'." For context, French researchers found that of the 48,035 Islamist terror attacks which took place worldwide between 1979 and 2021, France was the most affected nation in the EU “with at least 82 Islamist attacks and 332 deaths”.
These examples of more extreme violence in Europe took place over just two months. However, many cowards and charlatans in media and politics still refuse to acknowledge a simple fact about the barbarians who carried out the massacres of 9/11 in the US, 7/7 in the UK, 10/7 in Israel, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Manchester Arena, Florida’s Pulse gay club; or who butchered Lee Rigby and David Amess in London and beheaded a teacher named Samuel Paty in France; or who carried out the aforementioned 48,035 terror attacks; or who almost killed Salman Rushdie: they are all following on from a 1400-year-old tradition of jihad. And outside the West, the thousands of Nigerian Christians who are murdered and taken as sex slaves every year in Sharia law provinces attest to just how bad jihad can get.
Speaking of sex crime, worrying trends are emerging in Europe. “About 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the past five years”, stated a 2018 BBC piece, “were born abroad, according to data from Swedish national TV.” To put this in context, less than 20% of the Swedish population were foreign born in 2018, which means that members from about one fifth of the population were doing about three fifths of the total “rape and attempted rape” over a five year period. Apparently there is also a gang rape issue in Germany with migrant participation in 2022 similar to what was seen in Denmark: “nearly two women in Germany are gang raped per day, with foreigners, despite making up 19% of the population, accounting for nearly half of all rape suspects.” And in early 2023, The European Conservative highlighted a very disturbing trend here in Ireland:
“In a press release published on Thursday, March 2nd, the Garda Síochána revealed Ireland’s crime statistics for 2022, which indicate that reports of rape and sexual assault were 13% and 8% higher, respectively, compared to those recorded in 2019. Compared to statistics from 2011, the number of sex crimes jumped by 75%.
The comparison with records from just a little over a decade ago is revealing. In 2011, 2000 sexual offenses were committed; in 2021, authorities recorded more than 3,400. During the same period—2011 through 2022—the number of rapes reported across Ireland doubled, the government figures show.”
Hopefully this is merely due to increased rates of reporting rather than increased rates of actual crime. But perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps—if aforementioned trends in other countries are anything to go by—this increase has something to do with annual immigration rising from 53,300 in 2011, to 120,700 in 2022. If this link between sexual offenses and immigration turns out to be not just correlative but causative, one can’t help but feel that Irish authorities, out of fear of being called “racist” or providing support for “far right” rhetoric, might be following the horrid example set by authorities in England who buried their heads in the sand. England has seen a decades long “grooming gangs” scandal, most famously in Rotherham and Rochdale, involving thousands of mostly white working-class girls being raped by men of immigrant origin. “Over and over again,” writes Rakib Ehsan, “we have seen the same story unfold. Local councils and police forces, paralysed by the forces of political correctness and identity politics, have failed spectacularly to protect the children and young people in their care.” “Too often”, continues Ehsan, “politically correct identitarianism is getting in the way of protecting young, vulnerable members of the public.” The authorities, “fearful of appearing racist, did nothing.” (To learn more about the widespread sacrifice of women and girls in Europe at the altar of political correctness, see work by the ever courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)
Taking such examples of imported barbarism into consideration alongside Ireland’s unbelievably rapid demographic shift, longstanding infrastructural limitations, and glaring cultural incompatibilities, it stands to reason that increasing numbers of the Irish public are joining tens of millions of fellow Europeans in concern over reckless immigration. But alas, rather than address these concerns, the burgeoning Irish Total State plans to use “far right” the same way Orwell’s Ingsoc used “Eurasian spy”, use dystopian “hate speech” laws to punish Thought Crime, and use censorship of whatever they deem to be “mis-“ or “dis-“ or “malinformation” to Memory Hole facts and viewpoints inconvenient to the regime. Brendan O’Neill recently summarised this authoritarian disconnect between the Irish public and our ruling elites:
“Ireland has become hyper-woke. Its elites are fully converted to the gender cult. They promote the ruthless policing of ‘hate speech’, which really means dissent. They damn as ‘far right’ anyone who raises a peep of criticism about immigration. Their culture war on the past is relentless. Woke is the state religion of Ireland now. And if you thought Catholic Ireland was sexist, irrational and illiberal, just wait until you see what wokeness unleashes. Men marauding in women’s spaces, biological truth thrown into the dustbin of history, science made subservient to ideology, dissenters rebranded as ‘haters’ and threatened with censorship and possibly even jail – Ireland’s godless new ruling class is easily as backward and tyrannical as any of the priests of old.”
Attentive readers may recognise the provocative opening lines of this essay as a re-write of those kicking off Douglas Murray’s book, The Strange Death of Europe. In this 2017 bestseller, Murray warned clearly that European leaders “have decided to commit suicide”. And though late to the game of infinity immigration, in the years since Murray’s publication our elected officials have worked hard in accelerating toward The Strange Death of Ireland.
There is, sadly, a surreal uncertainty in pondering whether adequate numbers of Irish people will refuse to go along with this absurd process of self-annihilation. But if the genuinely wonderful referendum demolition has reminded the Irish of anything it is that, at least for now, power still lies with the public. We are in common sense populist revolt against establishment elites who have shown themselves to be totally unmoored from the vast majority of Ireland, and there will be two, if not three elections this year where the demolition job can be continued. New candidates are emerging, new alliances are forming and, hopefully, many more common sense counter-elites will step forward toward political duty in time. The regime is on the ropes. Let’s keep her lit.
Afterword
Much comes to mind when watching footage from the chaos in Coolock but, after some critical reflection, one thing stands out most. An Garda Síochána are being used as a battering ram to force through a reckless immigration policy to the detriment of the local populace. As places such as Denmark, Sweden and Germany clearly show, it is destined to make Irish policing far more difficult. Moreover, as illustrated by the fact that June's Islamist attack in Mannheim involving an Afghan stabbing 6 people including murdering a policeman, was just one of many Islamist knife attacks in recent memory, law enforcement in Ireland appears to be on a collision course with increasing religious violence.
Woke authoritarians ordering Gardaí to help force collections of individual men with no cultural or even civilizational connection to Ireland, into DEI-plantations, is obviously not in the interests of public safety or social cohesion. Yet for whatever reason – whether simple ignorance, naive well wishing, political correctness, 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, bleakly, many European neighbours have shown leads toward gritty carnage.
But this can't go on: something has got to give. Marine Le Pen’s supposed "far right" party, after all, got 38% of the votes. This is significantly more than any other party in France, the jihad capital of Europe. As I wrote prior to the elections here in June, however, "I worry that conditions have still not gotten bad enough for Irish people to drive necessarily radical change". A prime example of this is that Abul Kalam Azad Talukder, the Fianna Fáil councillor in Limerick who openly called for murder as discussed above, has since been re-elected. Another timely illustration of non-Irish privilege is that weeks of outrage erupted in the commentariat and political class when a native Irish soldier, Cathal Crotty, was given a suspended sentence after beating an Irish woman while, also in recent months, Vimalkarthick Balasubramaniam, Tareq Elkudir, and an anonymous Asian man, are all non-natives who sexually assaulted Irish women and then received suspended sentences with zero resulting uproar, and no widespread attention. Any target of ritualistic "Two Minutes Hate" must fit the rainbow regime's diversity narrative.
Sadly, this all 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 no longer have control over our own 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 the arguably treasonous "misinformation, lies and half-truths" fed to us by the government in a referendum campaign that, if it had been successful, "would undermine, or even outright destroy, the ability of the State to operate an effective immigration system", fully benevolent humanitarian motivations are impossible to believe. And so is it, as a pre-2016 Bernie Sanders or economic nationalist might suggest, in order to flood the market with cheap labour that undercuts the native working class, all to the benefit of Big Capital? Or is it, as a neoreactionary or realpolitik observer on the Right might suggest, in order to import an eerily Bioleninist voting block in order to support de-nationalised elites in suppressing indigenous political sentiment? I don't know. I just know it is happening and that the essay above, a Substack piece I am delighted to republish here with MEON, attempted to lay out this Strange Death of Ireland.