I was taken, yesterday, by the weekly warbling in the Irish Times of that newspaper’s star columnist, Una Mullally: Writing a thunderous piece titled “why weren’t warnings about the far right threat taken seriously”, she worked hard to link last Wednesday’s unedifying scenes in Dublin to just about every pernicious idea that she personally dislikes. Immigration protests got a mention, as did people concerned about sex education, as did alleged hostility to LGBT people, and various other issues.
And there was the usual call for both state intervention, and, of course, intervention from big tech companies. There’s only one thing for it, per Una: Shut the whole thing down, now.
Where are the tech companies headquartered in Dublin in all of this? Why aren’t their well-paid executives in front of Oireachtas committees answering questions about their roles in the hate they’re platforming? Politicians also need to look inside the gates of Leinster House as well as outside. It’s not like there aren’t senators and TDs spouting conspiracy theories and far-right talking points online and off.
What, exactly, we might ask, is a “far right talking point”? That’s not really defined, but Una (and many like her, in her defense) are very clear that big social media companies should be hauled before our politicians to answer for the views of people on their platforms, on foot of an unfocused protest that was allowed by its organisers and the Gardai to descend into chaos.
It would, I think, be useful, rather than dragging people into Leinster House, to instead have somebody like Una Mullally educate the public on the proper kinds of way to express their feelings on various topics. For example, she should go to Sallins, which has just had a refugee centre opened against the apparent wishes of many residents, and explain to the local residents the correct words that they should use, in a democracy, to say “we do not wish for this to happen in our town”.
Or she should go along to the Let Women Speak protest, and gently talk each speaker through the correct and reasonable way for them to express on the microphone the idea that they would like to protect single-sex, as opposed to single-gender, spaces for women in Ireland. Perhaps too, she could attend a library protest, and teach people the correct and polite way to say “I do not believe it appropriate for my child to be instructed in the correct techniques for oral sex”.
This is the issue: The problem that many of those who decry “far right talking points” have is not with the way those ideas are expressed, but with the fact that the public is impertinent enough to hold those ideas in the first place.
In this respect, last Wednesday’s protest was a godsend to such people, for the simple reason that there is no need to talk about ideas when you can talk about behaviour instead. The price for the bad behaviour of a few, which needs to be paid, per Mullally, is restrictions on the right of the many to express opinions which she dislikes.
If one was to diagnose the growth in the so-called far right in other countries, it would look a lot like this: The utter refusal of modern liberalism to listen to, or accept the bona fides of, people who have what are relatively minor disagreements with liberals about the construction of the society in which we all live. There are, for example, vanishingly few people in Ireland who believe that the country should have zero immigration: There is merely a disagreement on numbers, between an establishment that believes that the number of people we take should be unlimited, and a section of the populace who might settle for an annual influx capped at 5-10,000 people. This latter group is not unreasonable, but to liberal eyes, it must be delegitimised as far right.
The same is true in other debates: The “trans” debate is not between those who think Trans people have a right to be alive, and a mystical group who disagree. It is instead simply between those who believe that a man can become a woman, or vice versa, and those who believe that while you should be free to call yourself what you wish, you should not be free to claim supremacy over biological fact. On climate change, the disagreement is one of degree: Between those who believe Ireland should sacrifice itself on that altar unconditionally, and those who believe that our response should mirror that of the biggest polluting countries.
The problem for the establishment, such as it is, is that it is very hard to delegitimise the reasonable. As such, the only thing that they have left is to attempt to link reasonable beliefs with unreasonable behaviours to effect the situation where a majority of the people can be convinced that “only gurriers think these things”.
In other jurisdictions, this has not worked, and there is little to no evidence that it will ultimately work here either, in the long term. After all, this very tactic was deployed against Sinn Fein for decades. Look at that party now.
Eventually, the scale of the problems created by liberalism and its prejudices allow people to overcome their fears about being called “far right”. No thunderous columns in the Irish Times are going to avert that course, even with the foolish help of those eager to give those columns a basis.