THE COLUMN: In Ireland, a Very Happy Mammy's Day

Something remarkable happened in Ireland over the weekend. Just in time to celebrate International Women's Day and Irish Mother's Day (here often called "Mam's Day" or colloquially, "Mammy's Day"): the plain people of Ireland (in Flann O'Brien's memorable phrase) resoundingly rejected a freshly sprung trap against their constitution and their common sense. By roughly 70-30 percent, voters turned two thumbs down on a pair of amendments that basically would have eliminated the word "women" and their important role in the Irish home, and redefined the terms "family" and "care" to reflect more "modern" -- read: Leftist -- values. As the New York Times story whined in its subhed: "Two proposed amendments, which voters considered on Friday, were intended to reflect the more secular, liberal values of the nation’s modern era."

Thus did the progressive, radical, anti-Semitic, and Ukrainian-loving coalition government that currently controls the Republic of Ireland go down to an ignominious and fully deserved defeat. Irish politics consists of two antediluvian main parties -- Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil-- whose differences over the 1921 treaty that established the Irish Free State cost the life of revolutionary leader Michael Collins and led to the ascendancy of the American-born, half-Spanish, and very possibly illegitimate, Eamon de Valera, but are now long since lost in the boggy mists of memory. Irish history would have been better off had the roles been reversed.

But in the most recent parliamentary elections in 2020, neither party was able to win a governing majority and so Ireland is currently ruled by a nasty "progressive" Uniparty consisting of both of them plus the neo-Communist but numerically insignificant Green Party, which was handed several plum ministries as a reward for its role in cementing the Racket, including "environment," transportation, tourism, and -- in the person of the flamboyantly homosexual Roderic O'Gorman -- a Minister for children, youth, equality, disability, and integration. (You read that right.) The two top dogs, Fine Gael's openly gay half-Indian Leo Varadkar and Fianna Fáil's plodding, hapless Micheál Martin, have taken turns trading the top spot, the Taoiseach, or prime minister, with Varadkar currently occupying the office.

So much for the "more secular" values of old Ireland. Since the rise of Varadkar, a protégé of the World Economic Forum, Ireland has been pushed steadily to the Left, de-institutionalizing the Catholic Church, legalizing abortion and gay marriage, pushing for assisted suicide, and opening the borders to all comers, even those who arrive without passports or papers of any kind. It welcomes especially economic migrants (called "asylum spoofers" by ordinary citizens), and transporting and transplanting "refugees" from places that heretofore have had nothing whatsoever to with Ireland or Irish history, such as the Ukraine.

That every able-bodied Ukrainian male in the country is by definition a draft dodger and that by harboring them the government is depriving Vladimir Zelensky of much-needed manpower in his fight against Vladimir Putin -- a fight the Irish government ostentatiously supports, despite the fact that, constitutionally, Ireland is pledged to neutrality -- never seems to occur to them.

Meanwhile, the politicians continue to demonize any objections to the rapid social and demographic change as "far right" obstructionist racism and prejudice. That there is no major "far right" party does not disprove their theorem; having posited a counter-factual, they continue to act on it as if it were real, and continue to blame all opposition -- such as that, worldwide, to the fascist-adjacent "hate speech" law promulgated by the spectacularly inept justice minister, Helen McEntee law"-- on the "far right."

The fact that the mainstream Irish media is among the worst in the world -- completely subservient to the wishes of the current government when it's not actually funded by it, and determined to push the progressive Narrative at every opportunity -- enforces a propaganda regime that would do Stalin proud. 

Oops.

All of Ireland's current problem stem from the (still-partly-occupied) island's history. Eight hundred years of existence as an exploited colony of England -- Britain's first, and now last, colony, as it happens -- has left it a babe in the international woods, Bambi in a forest of Godzillas. Having once rejected membership in the European Union in 2008 by scuppering the Lisbon Treaty, the populace was forced to vote again, having obviously gotten it wrong the first time:

Humiliated at the polls, the Irish prime minister, Brian Cowen, admitted the country's no vote had been a potential setback for Europe... Ireland was the only one of the 27 EU member states obliged to hold a referendum on the treaty. Cowen will now have to travel to the Luxembourg summit and explain to his European counterparts how his country sunk the reform project. Flanked by grim-faced cabinet ministers at government buildings in Dublin, Cowen stressed that Ireland "does not wish to halt progress of Europe".

Ireland may have enjoyed a net gain of €40bn from Europe since it joined what was then the EEC in the mid-1970s, but its voters were concerned about the loss of sovereignty, possible tax harmonization and a threat to the country's neutrality.

Well, as I like to say, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Sure enough, less than two years later, the Lisbon Treaty staged a triumphant return in 2009, after the Celtic Tiger economy had -- surprise! -- collapsed and the unruly populace was appropriately chastened:

Both the yes and the no camps agreed that the key factor in turning the Irish electorate around this time was the parlous state of the economy. The two ruling parties, Fianna Fail and the Greens, alongside the main opposition parties warned throughout the campaign that a second no vote would isolate Ireland in the EU and endanger a European Central Bank-funded rescue plan for the Irish banking system as well as the overall economy.

So the muscle was applied and a suitably re-educated electorate effectively agreed to surrender its political sovereignty, its sustaining Catholic faith, and its economy to "Europe" in exchange for a few more highways and the complete takeover of its banking system, among other things. 

As I pointed out the other day on X/Twitter, Ireland has only been a State for about a century. But it has been a Nation for more than two millennia. Although it was never visited by the Romans -- they dubbed it Hibernia, the land of perpetual winter, and wanted no part of it -- it fell to the Normans in the 12th century and gradually became a province of the British Empire. And yet its nationhood -- its uniquely Irish language, customs, faith, traditions, culture -- was never doubted or disputed. Even today, with six of Ulster's counties still politically attached to the U.K., the Irish tricolor of green, white, and orange, represents the Nation, not the State.

"Statehood" is something the Irish Nation has had almost zero experience with. Now, that "State" -- embodied by the Racket (a collection of political finaglers that would make the Irish-dominated Tammany Hall in its heyday green with envy), and which uses the term constantly and never refers to the Irish nation -- has vowed to destroy the Nation. Secular government cannot abide competition.

This is in fully keeping with current Leftist/E.U./WEF thinking, which has manipulated the American model of "notional" countries -- that is, countries defined by allegiance to a given set of rules and thus open to all -- to achieve its communitarian, anti-civilizational policy goals. And yet the nation-state, the core political institution of the West since the gradual emergence of such entities after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, is predicated upon shared ethnicity, among others things. Thus France was for the French, Italy for the Italians, and Ireland for the Irish. Remove the French from France, however, and while you may still have a place called "France" on the map, you won't have France any more. 

So the 70 percent No/No vote was not just a rejection of the specifics of these hasty and unnecessary amendments, it was a complete repudiation of the Racket. The message was not just "no," but "hell, no" and "we hate you." Much as Varadkar & Co. don't want to admit, the Irish Nation includes some 70 million members of the wildly successful Irish Diaspora around the world, principally in Anglophonic countries such as the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand; many millions of us have an emotional, familial, and economic interest in what happens in the old country, and will not sit idly by while a small group of radicals trashes it. 

The Irish nation, in other words, is far more than just citizenship and a passport. Even more than a political entity, it's a place, a culture, and a state of mind. That's a lesson that the State can't learn and relearn often enough.