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Trump’s moves to cut off activist NGOs from state funding, through Executive Orders and Elon Musk’s DOGE, should be a roadmap for Ireland.
The modern NGO sector isn’t just a collection of do-gooders handing out meals and blankets. It has evolved into a part of what is called the permanent government or, as the Americans call it, ‘the Deep State’ – unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats and activists, but wielding real influence. It takes public money, uses it to lobby for pet projects and ideological aims, and then cries ‘fascism’ the moment anyone questions how they choose to spend public money.
Joseph Schumpeter warned, in 1942, that one of the factors that would contribute to the decline of capitalism was an oversupply of highly educated elites—people who believed they were owed power and status, but who found that the market did not value their supposed brilliance as much as they did. Lacking the financial rewards they expected, they would turn to ideological causes, seeking influence through state institutions, media, and academia rather than productive industry. These people, he said, would view both capitalism and democracy as impediments to their own recognition. This prediction has aged like a fine wine.
Today, the bloated NGO sector is one of the greatest manifestations of this phenomenon—overeducated but unemployable activists demanding public money to fund their own self-importance and sense of moral superiority, convinced that their opinions should dictate national policy despite never standing for election.
Every cent of public money comes from taxpayers — it is taken from you by the Government, by force we might add, and handed to someone else. That’s one thing when they take your money to build a school, and an entirely different thing when it’s to fund an NGO whose primary activity seems to be working to change Irish culture and politics into some new form that pleases them and their, often foreign, donors.
For years, they have played a cynical game—taking taxpayer money by claiming to be representative, then using the fact that they get government funding as ‘proof’ that they must be representative. It’s a closed loop, an exercise in political self-perpetuation. It’s proven to be extremely effective, both in securing funding and in securing their people with positions of influence inside both government expert groups and within the Irish media.
Where they’ve always lagged behind has been in their ability to deal with actual normal people. These organisations claim to speak for the people, yet the recent rejection of NGO-backed referendums has shown just how detached these groups are from the public they claim to represent.
Their legitimacy is a mirage, propped up by government cash and international donors rather than genuine public support. Many of the major Irish NGOs, whose representatives infest our airways and media outlets, have fewer actual members, that is actual people who support them enough to give them money, than your local GAA club.
And that is important to remember because this isn’t just about wasted money—it’s about control. When NGOs become too entrenched, they don’t just influence policy; they override democracy entirely. In countries where the activist class has fully captured government institutions, elections become meaningless, as unelected bureaucrats dictate policy regardless of who is in office. We are watching this process unfold in Brussels, where vast sums of public money fund an ideological machine accountable to no one. If we fail to act now, Ireland risks the same fate: a country run by faceless activists who never have to answer to the public they claim to represent.
These groups survive on a simple trick: emotional blackmail disguised as moral authority. It’s the political equivalent of showing you a puppy and telling you that investigating them means you’d be killing it – and you wouldn’t kill a puppy…would you?
The playbook is always the same:
That last one is particularly insidious, and we’ve seen it wielded ruthlessly by transgender activists. It doesn’t matter what your actual argument is. Oppose self-ID? You want trans people dead. Question puberty blockers for kids? You’re killing children.
It’s a form of argument that isn’t meant to be engaged with—it’s meant to shut down debate entirely. And for years, it worked.
What Trump has demonstrated — perhaps more than anything else — is that the willingness to kill that puppy was what held back previous attempts at cutting costs and dismantling entrenched bureaucracies. Time and again, politicians claimed they wanted to rein in wasteful spending, but they balked when confronted with the moral blackmail of activist groups and their media enablers. They stuck to accepted, ‘respectable’ cost cutting measures, and ultimately all they ever managed to achieve was to, at best, slow down the permanent government until they left office.
Trump, by contrast, ignored the hysteria, made the cuts, and the world kept turning, sans significant chunks of ‘the Deep State’. That is the lesson Ireland must learn.
Ireland, as a country, needs to come to terms with the fact that self-governance means making the hard choices. We cannot claim to be a serious nation while relying on others to pick up the slack — whether it’s depending on the UK to guarantee our airspace or international institutions to prop up failing domestic policies. Cutting off NGO funding, eliminating redundant state spending, and enforcing real national sovereignty requires the political will to endure short-term pain for long-term stability. If Ireland wants to be treated like a real country, it must act like one. That means cutting out the rot—not just in security but in governance. And that starts with facing down the NGOs that have embedded themselves in our institutions, feeding off public money while dictating policy without ever facing the electorate.
Luckily for us the increased overtness with which these groups are attempting to influence Irish politics and culture, whilst commonly seen as a sign of their increased influence, is making that an ever easier argument to make as their actions directly undermine their own legitimacy.
The more people see through the presentation and to the actual reality of these groups, the harder it becomes to separate the activist agenda of these groups from any genuine public service they might provide. At some point, the only rational response is to burn it all down, because NGOs have spent so long intertwining their politics with their supposed public good work that the two have become inseparable. Fixing the issue of political interference from state-funded and foreign-backed organisations means accepting that, at least temporarily, some legitimate services will have to be sacrificed. Like chemotherapy killing healthy cells alongside cancer, it will be an unpleasant but necessary purge—because allowing the rot to remain is far worse.
The logical conclusion of this corruption isn’t reform—it’s demolition. Strip these groups of their funding; dismantle their influence; legally limit the ability of organisations which accept state funding to lobby and influence policy; legally limit the ability of wealthy foreigners, with no connection to Ireland, to fund political and cultural change; and ultimately force these groups to justify their very existence to the Irish people.
And that’s their real fear. Not just losing money or a few cushy state contracts. The real fear is that people will wake up and realise that these groups were never needed in the first place.
At a certain point, people stop arguing about reform and start demanding destruction. And when that moment comes, these organisations won’t just be facing budget cuts. They’ll be fighting for their very legitimacy.
When that reckoning arrives, there will finally be two questions these groups can no longer dodge:
What exactly gives you the right to my money?
What exactly gives you the right to speak in my name?
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