Thoughts on the Dublin Riot

It was starting to seem as if the Irish were never going to fight back against the media and political psyop that is public life in their country. Until last weekend. As everybody knows by now, a long overdue riot erupted in Dublin city centre after an Algerian man stabbed three children and their teacher. The establishment instantly went into damage limitation mode, trying to salvage the narrative that mass immigration is an unalloyed good, first by suppressing the attacker’s nationality in favour of calling him an Irish citizen, then by amplifying the role of a Brazilian man in disarming him. They left out the equal parts played by an Irishman and a Frenchman, whose nationalities didn’t lend themselves to cancelling out the crime of one non-EU immigrant with the heroism of another. These details came out anyway through alternative channels but that part of the population that prefers to see the world through the prism of saintly progressives versus fascists are being given every opportunity by the legacy media to remain inside their cosy narrative.

While ‘the far right’ were being vilified for using a tragic incident to further their agenda, the government lost no time in using the riot to revive the hate speech bill that attracted international notice at the start of the summer. Conor McGregor is providing them with an opportune example of why it’s needed by saying that Ireland is at war following the recent conviction of a Roma man for murdering a schoolteacher. It’s not clear whether he thinks we’re at war with immigrants or with the government but no immigrants were targeted during the riot. If the rioters were indeed the same kind of street thugs as beat an American tourist almost to death a few months ago in Dublin city centre, as is being claimed, it’s odd that they only attacked police and state property. Immigrants themselves were walking the streets during the mayhem and seem to have been among the perpetrators of the small amount of looting that took place. This too failed to make it into mainstream media reports.

‘The far right’ in Ireland is a bogeyman used to justify the erosion of liberal freedoms, yet we’re told in the same breath that they represent an insignificantly tiny minority of the population. The progressives who say this are over-represented among groups such as politicians, academics, journalists, culture industry types, and the kind of career welfare-parasites with arty pretensions who are to be found in the bars and cafes of Irish cities in the middle of any working day. These are people who produce nothing besides rhetoric or copy, and perhaps this is why they feel the need to vilify those who make, sell, deliver, clean and maintain needful things in this country, who in my experience are mostly ‘far right’ according to the prevailing usage of that term. I haven’t written for Lotuseaters in a while because I’ve been working full-time in a manufacturing plant near Cork where I meet a variety of such people every day. I believe my experience is representative in part because polls show that 75 per cent of the general public think immigration needs to slow down or stop.

Paul Murphy, a far-left politician, tweeted today that the Sunday Independent has just published three op-eds about immigration as if this disproves the claim that the issue has been ignored by the mainstream media. It’s a classic case of the establishment belatedly noticing an issue raised by ‘the far right’ as if they’d discovered it by themselves. The riot therefore seems to have been more effective than the many peaceful demonstrations that preceded it in igniting a conversation about mass immigration. Even so, the rioters no less than their more irenic counterparts are still being described as ‘anti-immigrant’ and ‘anti-immigration’ as if the only alternative to being an open borders idealist is to be a xenophobe who wants a racially pure ethnostate. However, ‘the far right’ – i.e. ordinary Irish people – includes many immigrants who have assimilated to life here and are equally angry about what’s going on.

In Fermoy, the town where I work, there have been two sexual assaults involving immigrants over the past couple of years that have sown fear and anger among the population. This latest incident in Dublin has reawakened those feelings and I’ve heard some comments about it that probably count as racist by progressive standards. This is the reality of multiculturalism, though. I don’t think many Irish people have a problem with those who came here in the first wave of Celtic Tiger immigration to work and contribute, but since then we’ve been importing en masse the social problems of other countries without the kind of vetting process such as used to be taken for granted. Moreover, the children of some of these groups of immigrants have become a homegrown social problem, and are staking a claim to this country in defiance of the natives, as shown in a video shared by Keith Woods yesterday.

As always Twitter is a better place than the mainstream media to find the most pointed observations about this. Someone called Morgoth tweeted yesterday that no Englishman who’d lived in Ireland for thirty years would call himself Irish, and vice versa, but any person of colour living here for a while is required to be considered Irish. In the part of Cork where I live English has become a minority language through the presence of all these newly minted Irish people. It was said about the Anglo-Norman invaders who arrived here in the 12th century that they became more Irish than the Irish themselves. However, that process took a couple of centuries. Insofar as the same thing is true of the new arrivals of the past thirty years it’s in a parodic way. A good example is Abdullah Al Jumaili, a Muslim in a Saudi headdress who speaks with an Irish accent and posts videos of himself playing hurling. 

For myself, I’m not altogether nostalgic for the monocultural ethno-state I grew up in, but I’m angry that the new situation has been imposed on us by a class of people who think they know better than we do what’s good for us and who have never sought a mandate for their immigration policies. No Irish politician has ever run for election on a pro-immigration platform. There should have been hard limits placed on how many foreigners could settle here, and strict rules about only admitting people who have something to contribute. Instead, we were never allowed to have a national conversation about it and now I see West Indian junkies hanging out in my local park, Roma shoplifting gangs in the city centre, and every day I walk past an unemployed African man with Muslim prayer beads and shallow violent eyes who growls at me in pidgin if my dog pisses on a nearby lamppost while he’s smoking in the doorway of his house. If it’s racist to think these developments are worrying then I guess I’m a racist.

The rate of immigration doesn’t look likely to slow down in the near future, and so many foreigners are now entrenched here that nothing short of ethnic cleansing is going to remove them. Most of us on ‘the far right’ don’t have an appetite for that, but there is a far right in the historical sense of that term which does. For now, the latter really are a small minority, but since we don’t have a credible conservative party, the temptation in coming elections will be to vote for them as a way of pushing back against the current political establishment. Maybe The National Party would move towards the centre once they got mainstream legitimacy as Sinn Fein have done, but there’s a good chance they’d trigger the kind of hysteria that followed Trump’s election in the US and make the progressive elites even less respectful of democracy than they already are.