I was taken by this video, published on social media on Bank Holiday Monday last. I should stress that the contents of the video are not endorsed, or confirmed, by Gript Media, and that I am publishing the video only so that people might know what exactly the rest of this article is talking about.
The apparent subject of the campaigner’s ire in this instance is that the owner of the Café, who is not present, is also involved financially – he alleges – in the provision of direct provision centres in Ireland. I will pause at this point to say that this is a legitimate subject for political discussion, and investigation: My colleague, Matt Treacy, has done trojan work in an area few other journalists have ventured into, in listing and documenting those individuals and companies who are – legitimately and legally, it must be said – doing very well out of the Government’s migrant accommodation policy.
Yet that individual, whatever you think about his alleged business interests, is not present in the video above. Who is present, from what we can see in the video, is a young male employee and two elderly customers, both of whom are subjected to an uninvited and unwanted tirade about how a man – who, it’s at least fairly likely, none of them may ever have even met – is allegedly ruining the country.
To state things plainly: Normal, ordinary, reasonable people, who make up the majority of both the population and the voting electorate, rightly see this sort of conduct as bizarre, unhinged, unwelcome, and a sign of deep unpleasantness. Those are not emotions one would normally wish to have associated with your cause.
For a subset of activists, however, they seem to be becoming increasingly central to the brand. And the brand, I might add, seems to be becoming increasingly divorced from the particulars of the cause. In the social media era, “maker of loud noise” appears to be a brand all by itself.
There are defences for this sort of thing, of course, and in this job, I hear them all the time. The most common one is not to defend the conduct in question, but to engage in whataboutery: The standard line is that this kind of thing, while not ideal, is nothing compared to X and Y politician who are actively “ruining the country”, and that it’s somehow a betrayal for someone in my position to “turn on my own side”. Finally, there’s the idea that it’s somehow someone else’s job in our culture wars to criticise this sort of thing – the “you sound like Paul Murphy” defence – and that it’s the job of people like me to defend a true patriot, rather than to condemn one.
First, of course, that is not a defence, but a justification: The argument is effectively that shouting and roaring at third parties is fine if you are angry enough to do so, a social convention that, were it widely adopted, would make society an unpleasant place. The social conventions and values of the drunks that terrorise O’Connell Street do not need to be exported to the rest of Ireland.
Second, it is nonsense: Anyone who cares about a “cause” should be wary of those whose conduct actively discredits that cause. In this case, as a writer who broadly believes that immigration levels are too high, and provoking social unrest and economic problems in society, and tries to persuade others through my work that this is the case, this is the kind of incident that portrays all of us who take that view in a particular light.
The other defences that tend to be made are the “desperation defence” and the “deplorables defence”.
The “desperation defence” posits that this kind of thing only happens because people are desperate and not being heard. That defence is somewhat weakened by the fact that in this case, the shouter and roarer is an election candidate in a free election coming up in just nine weeks, and that he has every opportunity to make his case to the voters. Indeed, he may well, for all I know, get elected, though I’d imagine his shot at a high preference from the elderly couple in the Café may have decreased.
The “deplorables” defence is the most insidious, and tries to cast the critic as a kind of class snob, who would have less of a problem with people making their views known if those views were articulated in a pithy letter to the editor of the Irish Times which combined that infamously tiresome Irish middle class wit with sophisticated socratic argument, as opposed to being articulated in the accent of a working class Dub in plain man language. In other words, that defence goes: You’re a middle-class snob, McGuirk.
The problem with that is that there are few other writers who’ve been as consistent in condemning middle-class snobbery towards working class concerns than yours truly, in the first place. And in the second place, the idea that working class people don’t know how to behave in a Café is the very epitome of snobbery in itself. What is the young man behind the counter, by the way, if not a young man working to earn his keep?
Finally, there’s the rampant hypocrisy of it: Were this the behaviour of a far-left activist, going into a Café owned by some known immigration restrictionist, to shout and roar at the staff and customers, nobody would have any hesitation, at least on this broad side of the political fence, in calling it out for the thuggery and intimidation it is.
We live in a western civilisation. Many of those who call themselves Irish Patriots claim – fairly or unfairly – to be defending western civilisation, and our way of life. Acting like civilised people ourselves might be a good start.