A Reply to Terry Glavin
The current “From the river to the sea” hysteria in Ireland is reflective of a long history of antisemitism in my native country. No praise is too high for how Terry deals with it here and here. I strongly recommend them both. However, in the latter there’s a digression on the riot in Dublin on Thursday I want to take issue with. Let me start by quoting it in full:
“Irish Lives Matter”
If you think Canada’s political culture and Prime Minister Trudeau are an embarrassment, a fair match is made in Ireland’s jackeen class and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, and especially in Mary Lou McDonald’s Sinn Fein. The parallels between Varadkar’s government and Trudeau’s Liberal government are astonishing.
In Dublin, riots erupted Thursday following a horrific stabbing spree by a deranged man who was initially reported in social-media incitements to have been an Algerian. Among his victims were three schoolchildren and a caregiver.
Whatever his origin, Irish police say he’s in his late 40s and he’s been an Irish citizen nearly half his life. In any case, within hours, hundreds of people were going mental in what appears to have been mostly spontaneous bedlam. Police arrested 34 rioters after three buses and streetcar were set ablaze and 11 Gardai vehicles were smashed up, and there was looting of shops all along O’Connell Street.
While the riot had a distinctly Black Lives Matter vibe about it and a handful of ‘Irish Lives Matter’ placards were carried in the crowds, the Gardai say right-wing agitators were involved, and there’s truth in that. Even so, “anti-immigrant” rabblerousing doesn’t fairly describe the tensions that have been building in Ireland lately.
Just this past year, Ireland took in the second-highest number of immigrants since record-keeping began, largely because of the necessary welcoming of 50,000 Ukrainian refugees on top of a divisive government ambition to add 25 per cent to Ireland’s current population of five million by 2040. One-fifth of Ireland is already foreign-born.
Rents and house prices have shot through the roof, and the cost of living has been escalating at a punishing rate along with taxes. Hundreds of thousands of Irish people have fallen below the poverty line.
Canadians will be intimately familiar with this sort of thing.
A contentious “direct provision” policy has required villages and towns to turn over entire hotels and hostelries to newcomers who are provided a grudging pittance of welfare. In Greater Dublin, the new arrivals have been kept away from the city’s leafier districts and crammed into the working-class inner North Dublin.
With Sinn Fein’s abandonment of proletarian radicalism and its subsequent diffusion from Ulster to respectability in the Republic, the vacuum in Irish politics has been taken up by populist yobbery. But rven the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a human rights NGO that focuses on combating polarisation, disinformation and extremism, says there is a surfeit of “legitimate grievance” at work here.
The establishment parties have been pleased to dismiss the discontent as merely the anti-immigrant bigotry of howling pikeys. Sinn Fein and Fine Gael and the Social Democrats and Fianna Fail have preferred to busy themselves with more avant garde activities, like shouting themselves hoarse about the wickedness of the world’s only Jewish state.
And that’s how you start a riot.
There's no government plan or ambition to increase Ireland's population, there is rather official recognition that it's going to happen anyway and an attempt to plan to accommodate it
A plan that could undoubtedly be improved and better financed but it’s there to deal with the unavoidable fact that a very rich country with the rule of law and democracy is going to be an immigrant magnet. There's nothing legal we can do to stop them coming and nor should we try. The ones that are here already are one of the principal reasons we are so prosperous, the ones to come will continue to keep us that way.
The Dublin riot was only peripherally motivated by immigration; it's the issue of the moment because the arrival of the Ukrainians and the fact that the agitated state of the world, in general, has led to a big increase in those seeking international protection and this has put particular pressure on resources recently.
The scale of the violence was new but the motivation behind it wasn’t. There were anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown disturbances of a similar tone in recent years and the same impulse was behind much of the opposition to the abortion and gay marriage amendments to the constitution.
The core belief of the ideologists of this kind of politics is that Ireland was pretty much perfect in say 1975; everyone was white and churchgoing Catholic, women behaved themselves and there were no “queers” or immigrants, and all changes since then have been for the worse. It has recently been energised and spread by the social media frenzy that has caused problems everywhere and the idea that 'they' are not telling 'us' the truth.
Taoiseach Varadkar’s response to the riot was appropriate and statesmanlike, an example some of his European colleagues would do well to follow especially in his defence of immigrants in Ireland going hand in hand with his defence of the millions of Irish immigrants in other countries, as well as a firm defence of the rule of law and the police.
It should be recalled that the vituperative hate campaign directed against him (which Nazi Musk has joined) is founded mainly on him being gay and the son of an Indian doctor and an Irish nurse. He's everything they hate about actually existing Ireland as opposed to the fantasy Ireland of their wet dreams.
None of which is to say that the management of immigration couldn't be improved because it could sure could be and so could that of the health service, housing and a dozen other things.
The riot must mark an end to the “let’s not give them the confrontation they want” approach to the seeds of fascism in Ireland. If we don’t do it now it’ll be much more difficult later.