A quick review of the last twelve months tells me that this is the 431st article I have written in 2023, and the last. At an average length of about 800 words, that means I’ve written the equivalent of about three novels this year. All in all, not a bad record, given that I don’t write on weekends, bank holidays, or my 20 annual vacation days. Reading back through them all gives one a reasonable sense of the year that has just passed, and how the news and my thinking evolved with it.
One of the first pieces I wrote in 2023 was on January 12th, in an article in which I said that 2023 would be the year when there would be a “coming war on immigration protestors”. In keeping with my general stance as a pessimist, this proved to be right in one sense, and wrong in another. I wrote:
The protests over immigration are growing in frequency, and in scale. By the end of this month, if the present trajectory continues, it will be functionally impossible for anybody to credibly claim that the only people taking to the streets over immigration are a small cabal of far-right activists from facebook and telegram.
It is becoming necessary, therefore, to change the conversation. Instead of the protests being a political issue, about immigration or, if you prefer, the far right, they will instead be recast as a public order issue, requiring not a political response, but a policing response.
It took a little longer than “by the end of this month”, but there is little doubt that the central prediction I made was true: There is nobody serious in Irish politics who maintains the pretence that concerns over immigration are now confined to some fringe cabal of far-right insurrectionists. The second paragraph has held up well too, I’d argue: Here we are in December, and the Gardaí are to be armed with “double strength pepper spray” and tasers to fight the dangerous far right.
That really gives you a sense of 2023 in a nutshell, I think: This was the year the political establishment began to lose its grip on the political narrative in Ireland. The seminal event, I think – something that may go down in history as a historic political error – was the introduction of the hate speech bill.
That bill is not a popular piece of legislation. It has glaring flaws and the many over-reaches within it were ably pointed out, in late spring, by Senators Michael McDowell, Rónán Mullen, and Sharon Keogan. The significance of the bill is not that it is simply another flawed piece of legislation stuck in the legislative weeds, but rather that it gave opposition to this government across a range of issues a singular focal point to rally around. People worried about immigration were suddenly in the same boat as people worried about sex education in schools, or transgender issues, or the right to protest abortion. Suddenly, rather than being disparate interest groups, they had something that united them, and a sense of common purpose. Those groups also began to realise the extent to which their various interests and objectives coincided – they all have the same enemies.
Those enemies are not just the hate speech bill and its authors, but the predictable coalition that togged out as usual to support it: The big media outlets and the big political parties and the endless list of taxpayer NGOs. Suddenly those forces, which had been used to picking off opponents one by one on issue after issue, found themselves facing a much more united opposition. And one that holds a unified contempt for their dominance of Irish society.
2023 is also the year when the Irish media began to lose its footing. The Ryan Tubridy scandal was followed by the Irish Times publishing a race-baiting article about fake tan that transpired to have been written by a computer as a prank – the significance being that the Irish Times published it anyway because it seemed to tickle the prejudices of its editorial team. We had the Ryan Casey scandal, where the collective efforts of much of the media proved unable to censor the victim impact statement of the country’s most high-profile and most-sympathised-with bereaved boyfriend. TV licence revenue collapsed, and RTÉ made repeated missteps, such as introducing a transparently ludicrous “far right” character called Fergal into its flagship soap.
The significance of 2023 is that it is the year when “far right” stopped being a label people feared, and began to become a standing joke: Before this year, nobody would ever have jocularly referred to a friend as having dangerous far right ideas and meant it ironically. Now, it’s commonplace. The pieties of establishment Ireland, once observed with the fervour of the Latin Mass, are now viewed by many people with the same humour that Father Ted once directed against the Catholic Church. The fear, in other words, is gone.
The implications of this will take time to unwind. 2024 is a year of at least one major election – the local and European elections scheduled for May. Those elections may be the first ones in living memory where progressive parties do not sweep the board without opposition.
We live in a time of profound change. 2023 was the year it began to accelerate, at least in Ireland. 2024 promises to be at least as dramatic. If not more so.