It was interesting, last week, to observe in real time the emergence of a new Irish lobby group. The launch of “Trans Equality Together” was widely covered in the mainstream media, and the group had a banner first week, leading the charge against RTE’s Joe Duffy and his “LiveLine” programme, which had displayed the temerity to platform the voices of those concerned that the drive for Transgender recognition is increasingly driving women, and indeed the word “woman”, from our shared national space.
But “Trans Equality Together” is not a new group. It is simply an amalgamation of a lot of existing groups – all taxpayer funded, all singing from the same, relentless, progressive hymn sheet. The member groups are worth listing in full, just so as the reader can get a sense of the scale and number of these organisations, all of which you are paying for, to one extent or another, through the donation of your taxes:
Trans Equality Together, going by the signatories to one of their letters to the Irish Times, comprises the Irish Council for Civil Liberties; the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI); The National Women’s Council of Ireland; Dublin Pride; Amnesty International Ireland; Trans Greystones; Bi+ Ireland; the Irish network against racism; the Free Legal Advice Centres; The Open Doors Initiative; Outhouse; Intersex Ireland; BeLongTo; and LGBT Ireland. No doubt, as time goes on, more taxpayer funded organisations will sign up. The need for a new group, of course, is probably related to the ongoing financial and accounting problems at the Transgender Equality Network, which has now helpfully been supplanted by a new front of house organisation which will make the same arguments, by the same people, but without having to answer awkward questions about money.
It is worth contrasting the scale and the resources of the two sides to this particular argument: On one side, a single group, calling itself “The Countess”.
The Countess has a website, and about 10,000 followers on social media. It raises money by appealing to the public for donations. It receives no state funding, and nor is it ever likely to. To receive state funding, after all, you must be willing to advance the state ideology which, in 2022, is progressivism and nothing but progressivism.
On the other side, the panoply of groups above, all of which, to one extent or another, receive a hefty contribution from taxpayers, and all of which believe the same fundamental things on every issue. Even if you believe that these organisations are legitimate, we could save a lot of money by simply rolling them all up into one single Super-NGO, called “Progress”, and let it loose.
But this is how it goes, in Ireland, in 2022. The deck is stacked: Women, for example, have one official approved representative organisation, the NWCI, which is sanctioned and subsidised by the state. Any other group purporting to offer any other views on behalf of women is not sanctioned, and not subsidised. So it goes for LGBT people; and migrants; and travellers; and so on: Each have their state funded, and state approved representatives. Other views expressed for, or on behalf of, those communities, stand little chance of gaining traction.
What we learned, last week, when the public was allowed to discuss the particular issue of transgender rights openly, was that these taxpayer-funded groups do not necessarily represent the views of the public. Let alone the sectors of the public they purport to represent.
And so it was, in the latter half of the week, that we saw a full court press to silence the discussion.
“Full Court Press” is a phrase that comes from basketball, but it might equally refer to the royal courts of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, where powerful nobles lobbied the King while the less fortunate were excluded. Ireland now has its own class of powerful, favoured nobles, who hold the ability to lobby our rulers while the rest of us are excluded. That is why RTE has received a summons to the Oireachtas, to answer for the crime of allowing the public to be heard.
What we saw last week was, once again, a masterclass in the gaslighting of the nation. A flotilla of NGOs, who represent hardly anybody and would not survive a day without their subsidies (the NWCI, for example, raises less than one per cent of its funding from the public) embarked on a crusade to declare that the actual voices of the Irish people, when raised in opposition to their views, constituted “hate” and “bigotry”. Not one of them were able to specify a single example of such hate, not that this mattered.
This is the challenge for the Countess, as it is for all opposition in Ireland: The ideal of a democracy is that there is a free exchange of ideas, and the best ideas win the support of the public. But in Ireland, the deck is stacked. On one side, the group of activist citizens trying to make an impact. On the other, a legion of subsidised campaigners who form a praetorian guard and an inquisition all in one, posing as advocates for change, but in reality, devoted to ensuring that change will come only on the terms of the establishment.
The good news is that a growing number of us are aware of this, and alert to it. And that slowly, but surely, opposition is growing. The Countess does not have state funding on its side, or a legion of journalists hoping one day to get a job as its director of communications, or daily access to politicians, or anything like that. What it has is a good and compelling argument. And in the end, no law, no inquisition, no enquiry, and no state funding can stop the spread of a good and compelling argument.