Ireland is undergoing enormous and radical change, much of it arguably harmful, and almost all of it contrived without consulting the Irish people whose ancestors have inhabited this island for thousands of years.
Dr Eoin Lenihan’s best-seller ‘Vandalising Ireland: How the Government, NGOs, Academia and the Media Are Engineering a New Globalist Ireland’, is a meticulous, comprehensive, and vitally important telling of what we have lost in “pursuit of shiny things” – and what we can do to re-assert our identity, culture, and our economic wellbeing.
The fact that Vandalising Ireland sold in such numbers is testament to public hunger for such information and analysis. Lenihan’s book achieved the No. 1 spot on Amazon across all books in the first two days of its release; it also topped the charts to be the No.1 Irish Times bestseller in paperback nonfiction that week without any of the distribution or flattering press coverage considered essential to drive those kind of sales. Bookshops are now stocking Vandalising Ireland due to public demand. And the success of this timely and hugely interesting book is well-deserved, though the establishment media seems predictably disinterested.
Lenihan has studied history and trained as an archeologist, but perhaps the most advantageous lessons he learned in how to weave a narrative may have come from his father, Eddie, a seanchaí and expert in Irish folklore and tradition. The author’s breadth of knowledge of Ireland’s history and what shaped us a people is evident throughout, as is his ability to paint a picture of the more recent destructive changes to our country in a vivid and compelling way.
Some of the detail outlined in the opening chapter are a reminder of the deleterious impact of an unprecedented surge in both legal and illegal immigration on the country. In 2022, after [Minister] O’Gorman’s white paper, the number of asylum seekers “exploded” and that “from 2021 to 2022 there was a 427.7% increase from 2,469 to 13,651.46” persons arriving.
In the twelve months prior to September 2023, Ireland had accepted Ukrainian refugees at a rate ten times the EU average, Lenihan says, and by August 2023, an influx of 1,100 Ukrainians and another 100 refugees from other areas vastly outnumbered Lisdoonvarna’s native population of 800 – while the cost in terms of damage to tourism for the county was undeniable. Clare’s biggest town, Ennis, had lost €15.4 million in tourism income and in Westport, where there were 1,303 Ukrainians, losses stood at €33.3 million and 898 jobs. “Nearly as many Irish jobs were displaced as there were Ukrainians coming into the West,” Lenihan says.
It was, he notes, “an abuse of goodwill”, and one that set a pattern for what was to follow: Taoisigh and others in power scolding locals for objecting, insisting that no community had a veto; the increasingly aggressive tactics of the state including pepper-spraying protesters in Newtownmountkennedy; the rising public anger; the ‘misinformation’ from from the authorities which claimed migrants without passports were being vetted (they weren’t); the consternation in Coolock; the tents in Mount Street, and more.
The heavy-handed approach of the state led Independent TD Mattie McGrath to note that “the abject failure of the Government’s policy on migration is causing huge division”, describing what happened in Newtownmountkennedy as “shocking” and being “reminiscent of Northern Ireland and the RUC and B Specials”.
There’s also an useful reminder from Lenihan of what Simon Harris – now talking tough on immigration – told the Dáil in January 2024: “Ireland is not full. Ireland is not only for the Irish. What is this ‘unvetted male’ situation?… It is a loaded term. Stop using it”.
Harris took Varadkar’s policy regarding consultation with the people, Lenihan notes, and added to it: “No consultation, no veto — riot squad.”
The extraordinary pace of change has left Ireland, Lenihan says, “as a nation in which almost a quarter of its occupants were born overseas, with little more than the pursuit of money to unite them.” That shocking statistic, first revealed by Matt Treacy of this parish, is perhaps the most sobering of the data points in any examination of the rapid change being foisted on this small country.
But Vandalising Ireland doesn’t just look at migration data, but at the mindset and policies which left us open to such harmful change – and the role of the all-pervasive taxpayer funded NGOs and the media in driving an agenda and an ideology that cares little for the nation or its people.
A rapid review of the economy after the foundation of the state covers the trade war, dependence on agriculture, and the constant demographic bleed of emigration before the shift towards prioritising foreign investment and EU (then EEC) membership, all the way up to the Celtic Tiger, the housing bubble, the 2008 crash and subsequent bailout and beyond. Some readers may disagree with Lenihan’s take on the merits of subsidisation versus a laissez faire approach after the War of Independence, but he makes a compelling point regarding the economy’s increasing dependence on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).
The author argues that “up until 1997, the FDI economy worked to the benefit of the Irish people. Industrial investment needs were met by native stock”, and then points out that 1996 was “the last year in which FDI recruitment needs were largely supported by the native population. From this point on, further economic expansion would be reliant on immigration, both of returning nationals and non-nationals”. He argues that Ireland worked to attract tech companies, for example, without ensuring that we were producing the STEM graduates necessary to meet demand.
The effect of that reliance is that migrant workers, particularly in major tech companies, helped to price Irish people out of the housing market, Lenihan says, with a 2024 report finding that 40% of Irish people in employment between the ages of 25 and 34 were still living at home, compared to 12% of Germans, 12% of French, 2% of Swedish and 2% of Finnish young people.
Interestingly, Vanishing Ireland looks briefly at housing successes in the past, such as social housing expansion under Fianna Fáil, and the Rural Housing Organisation established by Fr Harry Bohan. Lessons might be learned from those initiatives as our housing crisis continues to drive young people from the country.
But as the crisis in housing and immigration continued with devastating effect, the three main parties simply “go where they believe the votes are”, and this leaves Ireland, Lenihan says, “as a crippled democracy where voters have only the illusion of choice each time an election comes around”.
The author is excellent in his forensic examination of Leo Varadkar’s ridiculous claim that St Patrick was an “unvetted migrant” – and in disassembling the pernicious claim that because the Irish emigrated in vast numbers, mostly as a result of the cruelty of colonisation or the sheer ineptitude of government, we owe some sort of moral debt to the world which involves throwing open our borders to the world.
He also examines the absurdity of the accusation (for that is what it always is) of ‘white privilege’ in the Irish context and provides an interesting rebuttal of some of the claims made in Noel Ignatiev’s ‘How the Irish Became White’, before examining the result of the long march through the institutions that has led us to rule by NGOs – the NGO Industrial Complex, devoted to the wilder fringes of Critical Race Studies, Queer Theory and other egregious nonsense.
While it may be nonsense, our universities are now busy churning out graduates steeped in Social Justice Theory to staff the NGOs who Lenihan describes as wrecking crews who seek an Ireland that is “globalised, rootless, intersectional, multi-cultural and utterly bland”.
He also takes aim at the national media for their uncritical support for radical change while actively ignoring the harmful consequences, though in my opinion the threat of defamation is nowhere near as significant a factor as the cultivation of groupthink – notorious in the Irish media – while, as Lenihan examines, lavish state funding or handouts for the media, in particular the national broadcaster, has to have an impact on coverage of politics.
What to do? Lenihan emphasises cultural revival, and a socially conservative but economically laissez-faire model that empowers local government, and encourages love of nation. He also cautions against trust in the main political parties given their track record. And he comes back to FDI and the question as of a nation’s relationships with multinationals, arguing that the government should encourage multinationals that fit the graduate profile of Irish universities, creating, he believes, “a fundamental economic, social and psychological shift in the nation. Multinationals
serve the Irish, not the other way around”.
Uncoupling agriculture from EU control; fostering innovation with universities as innovation hubs; and harnessing natural resources such as our untapped oil and gas – and our fishing grounds – are all suggestions that Lenihan concludes can free us from an economic dependency mindset to shape our own destiny. Earlier, he had written of Alexis de Tocqueville’s impressions of Ireland, where, despite centuries of dispossession and brutalisation of the native Irish from the Statutes of Kilkenny through the Penal Laws, the French philosopher found that in the decade before An Gorta Mór, the defining features of even the poorest of the Irish included “a passion for education, a strong moral code, particularly in familial affairs, and a veneration of memory and oral custom”, in addition to a notable religious devotion.
The author is perhaps a tad too gloomy in regard to what we have lost already in regard to our culture. Gaelic games are enormously popular, and the traditional arts, especially our music, are thriving. Gaeilge is having a hugely positive moment, as evidenced not just by online influencers but by a surge in those attending classes and initiatives like Ciorcal Comhráite. Táimid fós beo. But he is entirely correct that a vandalised Ireland can only further diminish and perhaps destroy that rich culture and heritage.
Vandalising Ireland brings a shape to our understanding of the rapid and detrimental changes that have been foisted on Ireland and intellectual heft to an overdue analysis of same. It is recommended reading.