The increasing unease felt by communities around the country regarding the consequences of uncontrolled mass immigration has led to all sorts of actors rallying to the cause of diversity and multi-culturalism – though preferably not on their manor.
Following years of censorship and even bullying, as noted by Laois Offaly TD Carol Nolan in the Dáil yesterday, immigration and in particular the influx of young men from countries where there are no wars or recognised human rights crises has become a key political issue. And it is right to stress that it is political because it highlights the extent to which the state media and state funded NGOs have taken a side in that debate.
This has extended now to the education sector. Yesterday, the official Twitter account of Dublin City University reposted a piece the state broadcaster RTÉ had published by Professor James Kelly and a DCU post graduate student Kirsty Park on how references to the English and Scottish plantations of Ireland were being misused by the “far right” in their arguments against accommodation centres.
Without rehashing my own earlier responses to this relentless campaign by the left liberal establishment here, I will merely refer readers to a response to the DCU post which quotes not some “far right” persona but one of the icons of the Irish bourgeois liberal left.
None other than former President McAleese, who in 2019 used exactly that term – plantation – as an analogy for the huge demographic changes taking place here as a consequence of mass immigration.
Of course, McAleese – and those who have benefitted from non-union labour from outside of the EU, as landlords, NGO shareholders and employees, the hirers of cheap au pairs and domestic servants, and even as the sponsors of surrogate mothers it seems – think that the architects of this policy have done “a really, really wonderful job.” It doesn’t look that necessarily if you are in one of the communities that is at the coalface of all of this in terms of housing, crime, schools, hospitals, and so on.
McAleese is correct about one thing, of course. The 16th and 17th century plantations are a proper analogy for the demographic change. This is state is rapidly approaching a stage – if indeed it has not already done – where close to 20% of the population are born outside of the country. That has not happened since the period between the Cromwellian genocide and the ongoing influx of land grabbers over the following 100 years.
If you think that is a good thing, and many do, then fine. Own it as they say. However, if you do not, then it is perfectly valid to argue your point on the basis of history just as the liberal left rely on tired old mantras of “Oh, sure the Irish went everywhere,” and “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish.”
What is more interesting is to look at the source of many of the arguments. Kirsty Park and Kelly present an argument, and raise alarm about the rise of the ‘far-right’, to a large extent based on tenuous references to social media posts. Yet if that’s the standard of evidence, Park’s own Twitter account indicates a preference for following well-known Irish left actors who are engaged in a similar “observing” enterprise including the British Home Office “partnered” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and the strangely quiescent Far Right Observatory. Perhaps she is not just a disinterested academic, or perhaps analyses of social media can often lead one to jump to incorrect conclusions. Sauce for the goose, and so on.
Many of these ‘observers’ who are eager to tell Irish people what words they are allowed to use are funded by the EU, including the European Digital Media Observatory (EMDO) which was given €11 million by the European Commission in May 2021 and appears to channel some of that through DCU. It claims to pursue “online disinformation” but as with others who are benefitting from this vastly funded business, they are clearly politically motivated in support of the left, which includes for the purposes of EU policy towards Ireland, the dominant ideological trend within the European Commission.
The Assistant Professor of Communications at DCU, Eileen Culloty, is also involved with EMDO and she was one of the lead participants in a publicly-funded seminar at Maynooth earlier in the year entitled STOPTHEFARRIGHT. I will leave it to readers to judge from their own graphic whether this looks like the sort of academic event that ought to have been taxpayer funded through the Irish Research Council, much less anything approaching a sober intellectual discussion.
So when you read any of this stuff, bear in mind that you are usually talking about a relatively small group of well-funded, liberal or left-leaning actors and commentators who dominate quite a swathe of publicly funded academia and the NGO sector, as well as being influential within the media.
Irish lefties are fond of spouting about “punching up” and what not. They seem oblivious to the irony that in this context it is they who are on the top, and like Orwell’s pigs stuffing themselves on the tab of the “enemy,” they are not only singing for their supper but punching down on the people of East Wall and elsewhere.