Sympathy for the Irish

"This is not who we are"

It seems that there have just been some riots in Dublin. The details are not very clear, but apparently a few schoolchildren were stabbed by an Algerian migrant, right on Parnell Square, which led to fighting and then to a more generalized anti-government riots, with cars being burned and clashes with the police which are only now clearing up.

It’s funny, but I was just thinking about the Irish. I was just reading some stories by Frank O’Connor, which are really great, by the way.

And, you know, I really like the Irish. I don’t really know why. I'm not Irish and I've never been to Ireland. Maybe it’s because they’re Catholic. Or maybe it’s because they used to be poor and drunk and rebellious. Maybe it’s because they fought so much as underdogs against the English. Or maybe it’s just because they have so many great singers and poets and writers.

Yeats.

O’Connor (both Frank and Flannery, who was Irish-American).

The Pogues.

So many others I can’t even think of right now. 

I can’t relate to the Anglos, to the so-called WASPs, at all. Nothing personal against them, I just don’t really understand them. Their mentality is basically very different from mine. But I do get the Irish.  

And it’s sad what’s happening to that nation, which seems to have gained its independence only to sell it right away. 

The current Irish PM, Leo Varadkar, said that the riots “brought shame to Ireland, and that the violence was not reflective of the Irish people.”

“This is not who we are”, he said. The cliche of cliches of the modern world. “This is not who we are”. But what are we, then? 

And I ask myself, why is a half-Indian, gay man talking about and representing “the Irish people”, the traditionally Catholic Irish? It’s just bizarre. 

Bear in mind that this is the same PM that, just a few days ago, was saying that foreign asylum seekers should be hosted even in small towns, and even against the wishes of the locals, and that “nobody has a right of veto to say who lives near them, beside them, or in their town or village.”

I think it’s slowly dawning now on most people in the West that our supposed representatives are not really our representatives at all.  

And it doesn’t even matter if they call themselves, or are called by the media, “left-wing”, “right-wing”, or “far-right” or “far-left”. No matter what label they are given, they are all part of some Global Uniparty. 

They do not represent the native people, and not even the migrants, but a new form of of global government bent on creating some kind of technocratic society where nations and cultures will not exist anymore, and everyone will be just a number, or not even a number, but a package of Big Data to be analyzed and controlled by facial recognition and vaccine passes and AI.  

“Imagine there’s no countries, and no religion too. Imagine all the people sharing all the world”, sang John Lennon. (Who was partly Irish too, I think.)

Not Lennon's best song, by far, but it became a boomer hymn, and I guess it seemed like a nice dream at the time, when it was just a utopia. But now that it’s becoming real, it’s revealing its ugly and dark side. 

Turns out that having no countries and no religion doesn’t lead to “a brotherhood of men”, but to chaos and to the fighting of all against all. 

These riots will not last. But it's likely that in the near future there will be more violence, and then other riots.

Perhaps the Troubles are coming up again, but now in the form of a conflict, not of the Irish against the English, but of the people against the government. Perhaps the rebellion starts in Ireland.

Whatever happens, there are rough times ahead.

Such is the luck of the Irish. 

Colourized photograph of Irish children in 1946.