The Irish working class is restive
Elections last week showed they are no longer buying what Sinn Fein is selling. Good.
In 1995, when I was in my first year at Trinity College Dublin, I tagged along to a meeting my father had with a high ranking government official, in his swish office just a few steps away from Merrion Square, the most graceful of all Dublin’s parks. There is no danger of me revealing his identity, as both his name and party affiliation are lost to the mists of time.
But I remember vividly what he said. He said that within 20 or 30 years, Sinn Fein would be the biggest political party in Ireland, north and south. They were so politically savvy, so organised and on message, that their rise seemed inexorable.
He was right. Until this weekend, when he wasn’t.
Last weekend in Ireland elections for local counsellors and the European Parliament were held. For any Americans who don’t closely follow, each EU member country sends delegates elected by the people to the European Parliament — which is essentially a powerless body, and normally the elections are mostly unremarked on. But this year, populist nationalists across the continent seized the opportunity to sharply reject the progressive, bureaucratic, open-borders, status quo.
The two big parties, according to John McGurk at indy news site Gript, seemed to fuse into one uniparty, which it looks like they might need to do to survive. Just a short time ago, it seemed they were on the back heel to Sinn Fein. At the time, Sinn Fein were posing as radical newcomers and working class heroes, which lead them to a huge victory that made them the biggest vote getter in the 2020 general election.
But last weekend Sinn Fein took a bit of a kicking . Their working class base mostly abandoned it, at least for now, and for entirely fair reasons. Short version: Sinn Fein went woke. And outside the professional managerial class, everyone hates woke.
As the Spectator reported: “they have been virtually wiped out in the local election results. The reason? Well, Mary Lou McDonald, leader of Sinn Fein essentially adopted an open borders policy which would allow mass immigration into Ireland.”
Ireland has been getting headlines in the United States recently, especially in the right-wing press, because it is experiencing an influx of migrants the likes of which this small island nation has never seen. All the major Irish parties, formerly ultra-nationalist Sinn Fein included, supported this.
Not surprisingly, this has worried working class and rural communities because, just like everywhere else this is happening, it’s those with the least that are being expected to do the most.
Dublin is a tough, old, city that has always had a poverty problem. In the last 25 or so years, it has performed that crappy magic trick that cities often do — it has seen huge levels of gentrification without much — if any — upward mobility for the native, long-standing residents of the poor neighbourhoods where shiny new apartment blocks and cafes start sprouting up. Dublin now is home to thousands of affluent, educated, non-Irish who come to work in the huge tech sector, and many other immigrants who come to work in the service industries that feed and clean the tech yuppies. You walk down the streets, most of all in the summer when hordes of rich Spanish and Italian teens come to learn English, and hear very few Dublin accents. That’s how cosmopolitan it has become. But the locals barely got a look-in. Adding migrants to this problem was always going to be combustible.
In East Wall, an old neighbourhood adjacent to Dublin’s port and within walking distance of the city centre, the arrival of migrants — or asylum seekers, depending on who you ask — became a flash point in late 2022. It was the first time I noticed a change in tone of the conversation. Videos started circulating of locals protesting day and night, and I also started noticing mainstream press — which is just as woke in Ireland as it is in the US or the UK — starting to call these locals far-right and racist.
An East Wall resident told the Irish Times in 2022: “All we saw was videos of men being bussed into the area,” said Emma Douglas (26), who was at the protest. “We completely agree with having refugees, but you can’t bang up to 380 people into a community and expect there not to be any adversity.”
Watch this video for a bit of history of the East Wall area, which makes clear how ridiculous it is to call these people far-right.
Since then it’s all just accelerated. Every time I open my socials I see another video from some small town or Dublin neighbourhood of locals protesting another group of migrants arriving. Sometimes there are police and arrests being carried out — of Irish people. And something about it all just feels off to me.
It’s not that I don’t believe the working class discontent about this is genuine, of course it’s genuine, and it’s not driven by malice or racism, no matter how much the media like to pretend otherwise. Nor do I think working class people are being radicalised by shadowy bot farms. This, in my opinion is the dumbest of all the progressives’ opinions of their political opposites, that somehow they lack the agency to decide for themselves that the progressive elites are shafting them. It must be the bots!
The whole thing just feels engineered to me.
A video has been doing the rounds on my Instagram about how Mohammed is now the most popular name for baby boys in Galway city. Initially, I doubted this was true — but according this article in a Galway newspaper, it is.
There’s very little in Galway, when you take out the tourists. Galway — or any other part of Ireland for that matter — is not some capital of industrial power where poor people from other countries in search of better jobs would naturally flock. This is not the like the waves of poor southern Italians seeking factory jobs in highly productive 10950’s northern Italy; or the millions of Irish who fled to America where they paved the roads and laid the railway tracks.
Tent encampments appeared along the Grand Canal in one of the loveliest parts of Dublin, and the government spent nearly 100,000 euros cleaning them up. Andy Ngo shared a video on Instagram of five thousand people being granted Irish citizenship in a mass naturalisation ceremony in Killarney, of all places.
Elsewhere of course, this new type of immigration is engineered, if the reporting done by Brett Weinstein and Michael Yon from Panama is anything to go by. Nation states like China and global organisations like the United Nations seem to be involved in greasing the pipeline of souls that have been pouring across the southern US border for several years now. A smaller version seems to be happening in Ireland. Which, not coincidentally, has a huge number of NGO’s.
The NGO’s — unlike political party representatives — never have to face the angry Irish electorate. They can operate essentially in the shadows, receiving huge amounts of taxpayer money with almost no accountability that public-facing politicians have. I have not seen any reporting on this, but I would bet my bottom dollar that none of the folks running the NGO’s — on any topic — are from neighbourhoods like East Wall in Dublin, which just elected working class populist nationalist Malachy Steenson. So while I’m happy to see the working class underdog get some representation, the PMC- heavy NGO’s will ultimately be able to do do an end-run around the will of the people. I hope those newly elected populist-nationalist and working class representatives will act as a force for change, before the Irish people get baited into something that can’t be undone.