"Whose Streets? Our Streets!"

Whatever happened to the old slogan, "Ireland for the Irish?" A report on Irish populism

DUBLIN, Ireland, June 22: A couple days ago I picked up a copy of the Irish Examiner, and old-fashioned broadsheet newspaper—the kind where the ink rubs off on your fingers as you read it spread out on your table while you sip your breakfast coffee. Ah, for the good old days when newspapers were real things. Turns out there are a lot of them in Ireland, and I wonder if they are government subsidized or something because they don’t seem to have the advertising base to support them. Here’s a typical bookshop newsstand, offering national and regional papers:

That’s a lot of papers for a country this size. But alas Irish newspapers turn out to be just as bad as their American counterparts when it comes to reporting on the “far right.” The story that caught my eye was:

Academics in University College Cork (UCC) said there has been “an increase” in both far-right and extreme right-wing activity in Ireland in recent years - seen in online activism, street protests, and “even violence”.

“Although there is a longstanding belief that there is no far-right presence in Ireland because the country has so far avoided the presence of any successful far-right parties in national politics, this article demonstrates that Irish far-right networks are using online platforms to build their base, discuss and disseminate misinformation, conspiracy theories, and divisive and discriminatory rhetoric," the research said.

Imagine! Using the internet to “build a base” when none of the established parties will pay attention to trending public opinion. Maybe Ireland’s established parties ought to pay attention to the latest polls in Britain, which find that if a national election were held today, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party would possibly win an outright majority in the House of Commons, with the Tory Party shrinking almost to extinction levels:

Anyway, about that Irish “study”:

The study was carried out by academics from UCC Department of Sociology and Criminology - Gabriella Fattibene, James Windle and Orla Lynch - and technical experts from online threat monitoring company, Moonshot. . .

You can pretty much stop after “carried about by academics,” because you know how this will turn out. Actually that whole sentence looks like it came from an updated P.G. Wodehouse comic novel. But just so you can savor the full absurdity of it, two more sentences:

The research, published in Perspectives on Terrorism, said the Irish political system has resulted in no far-right political party emerging on the scene, in terms of successful representation.

But it said the aim of many on the far-right or alt-right is to get people to think about politics rather than change party politics, by getting issues they want to push into normal, mainstream society.

As it happens, I got wind of a populist protest happening Sunday afternoon in Dublin, where I am cooling my heels for a few days before returning to the U.S. by way of the east coast for some business (silly to fly all the way back to California and then turn right around and fly back east, so pub-hopping for a few days in Ireland seemed sensible).

But then, you can’t count out the left for organizing a counter-protest:

Only one thing to do: Go to both! There were organized at a location about a mile apart from one another and separated by the River Liffey that bisects Dublin, but it was clear the lefties were going to march across the river to confront the National Protest march, and the Dublin police (“Garda” in Irish) was out in force to keep the two groups apart (memo to the incompetent Charlottesville police of 2017 to come).

Now, the lefty gathering was rather pathetic, but an inversion of who we see turning up at anti-Trump protests in the U.S., which are dominated by aging baby boomers from the looks of things. This Dublin lefty gathering was 85% the university student/unemployed coffee house crowd, with a predictable quotient of purple-haired women, etc. It looked to be about 500 at most, passing out a lot of socialist/communist literature. Ireland’s RTE news (which is Ireland’s version of NPR) described the counterprotest as follows:

Several organisations and groups are involved in the counter-demonstration, including trade unions, the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, People Before Profit, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats, the Socialist Party, LGBTQ+ groups and students unions.

There didn’t appear to be many employed people here—or migrants.

Conspicuously missing? Any actual migrants. Having lunch in a cafe nearby before the muster of the miserable, I overheard an upcoming participant say to his lunch mate: “The shooting of the United Healthcare CEO put real fear into people in America. There needs to be more of that; you need people to fear before change can happen.” Good to know. I wonder how this coffee house comrade would fare in 2nd Amendment America.

From there I walked over the bridge and up to Parnell Street, where the “far right” march was mustering for its parade down to the river and to Customs House where the formal rally would culminate with speakers. The march must have stretched for 10 long blocks or more along O’Connell Street, with the local media estimating the total crowd as large as 20,000. The contrast with the tiny leftist protesters was obvious to everyone. It was hard to capture the dimensions in photographs or video. Here’s one sample of a organized subgroup showing up:

What you noticed about the “far right” protesters is that they were a much more diverse assembly: young, old, in-between, working class, etc. A close look at the crowd reveals a number of familiar themes—prominent among them indications of how Trump is the world-historical figure of our time:

The march culminated with a rally in front of Customs House:

The left shouted, “We’re for people; not for profit,” which rather gives away their core disposition, along with “Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here!” Meanwhile, I don’t think this banner from the leftist protest is quite the world-beater they think it is: isn’t “bad government” exactly the core of the “far right” protest?

The rally at Customs House took me back several decades and highlighted how dramatically things have changed. Back in high school in the 1970s, my Irish Catholic friends with predictable anti-British views loved the slogan, “Ireland for the Irish.” The first time I went to London as a teenager was around the time an IRA bomb had gone off in Harrod’s famed department store, and all the rail cars in the “tube” carried placards asking riders to flag unattended packages. (They may still have such placards today, but the IRA is no longer the source of them.)

Today, “Ireland for the Irish” is hate speech for the cosmopolitan establishment. Several of the speakers struck the note that “Our problem is not London [or the British]; it is Brussels—and our own traitor government.” “We aren’t allowed to love Ireland any more.”

Think of it: after centuries of visceral hatred of England, Irish patriots now look with envy on Brexit and wish to emulate it, along with looking for their own Nigel Farage to organize a party to carry the banner in practical politics.