What does it mean to be Irish?
Answers to this question have a tendency to produce more heat than light, not least because what it means to be Irish means different things to different people.
I’d like to suggest that there are three ways in which one can be said to be Irish: ancestrally (IA); culturally (IC) and legally (IL).
You are Irish ancestrally (IA) if your parents (or, at least, one of your parents) are Irish. You are Irish culturally (IC) if you have been brought up and live/work in Ireland, speak Irish or English as your native language, and understand and employ Irish cultural norms. You are Irish legally (IL) if you are an Irish citizen.
Most people living in Ireland are Irish in all three ways although, because of mass immigration, combined with a high-incidence of naturalisation, this is becoming less normal than it used to be. A significant number of people are legally Irish (IL) who are neither Irish ancestrally (IA) nor Irish culturally ( IC).
The question that should be at the heart of any sensible discussion of immigration is: what is, or what will be, the economic, social, cultural and political effects of the importation of relatively large numbers of strangers into a relatively stable social and cultural whole?
Here’s a thought experiment: consider a country that is largely socially and culturally homogeneous and that has exactly 5 million people living in it. Now add to this country another 5 million people of different ethnicities, speaking different languages, with different social and cultural norms.
What would be the result? Whatever the long-term prospects for integration—and the experience of other countries tells us they must be moot—the short-term results would almost certainly be economic disruption, social tensions and cultural frisson.
Memory is constitutive of human personality—without memory, we are still human beings but our personalities shrink and may eventually disintegrate. Similarly, history is constitutive of a nation’s cultural personality, without it, a people is just a haphazard collection of individuals living in a particular area. A people’s history must be that people’s history, that is, it must be the product of the experiences of their ancestors, not, as in the film Total Recall, implanted memories, or the memories of someone else’s ancestors.
History, then, is to a people, a nation, a culture, what memory is to an individual. This history expressed in a nation’s customs, habits, conventions, often unstated and perhaps even unstateable, in its language or languages, its music and its sports, gives rise to and sustains a sense of being related one to another.
No people can preserve its culture, its identity, if it forced to absorb a significant number of unassimilated or unassimilable strangers. No one can say what precisely this number might be but whatever it may be, numbers matter.
Multiculturalism is not something that can actually exist except in the most trivial of senses. There can be only one dominant culture in any coherent society and, perhaps significantly, in any stable political entity.
Independent TD for Offaly Carol Nolan has established that more than a quarter of a million people have been granted Irish citizenship through naturalisation since 2011. “These figures represent a very substantial demographic change over a relatively short period of time and is a matter that deserves open, honest and mature public discussion,” Deputy Nolan said.
In an interview from 2019, Sir David Attenborough said: “I don’t think any human society is prepared to make decisions which they may not like if they’re made by people who don’t speak the same language….It’s very easy, as we all know, to be very tolerant of minorities until they become majorities and you find yourself a minority. It’s easy to say ‘Oh yes, these lovely people—I love the way they wear such interesting costumes.’ You know, that’s fine until some day you find they’re actually telling you what to do and that they’ve actually taken over the town council and what you thought was your home was not.” Attenborough made it clear that he wasn’t supporting this way of looking at things but, nonetheless, he expressed these concerns very accurately.
Every generation in a nation must appropriate its history and culture, embody it, enrich it, and pass it on to the next. These cultural traditions aren’t lumpish material objects but vital and dynamic ways of thinking and speaking, ways of living together as a people.
As Yoram Hazony writes in The Virtue of Nationalism, “The overwhelming dominance of a single, cohesive nationality, bound together by indissoluble bonds of mutual loyalty, is in fact the only basis for domestic peace within a free state.”
What are some of the effects of the slow-motion invasion and colonisation that is mass immigration? Perhaps most evidently, the exploitation of social welfare programmes created for and paid for by citizens of host countries, a significant increase in sexual and other forms of violence, and random acts of intimidation and disorder in public spaces that leads to their functional abandonment by the native population. Somewhat less spectacular but nonetheless tangible is an overall deterioration in the society’s fabric of common understandings and social conventions with a resultant impoverishment, even a sense of estrangement, from one’s homeland.
When we import people from elsewhere, we don’t import blank slates on which we may write whatever we choose. Along with the people, we import their tribes and their tribal loyalties, their cultures, their divisions, their conflicts and, on occasion, their criminal networks.
Thomas Sowell puts it with his characteristic succinctness: “Europe is belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward the people who have let them in.”
To be a citizen of a state one must be the beneficiary of powers or privileges that do not accrue to just anyone who happens to be resident in the state, otherwise, there is no difference between being a citizen and being a sojourner, a visitor or a tourist. Obtaining a state passport makes you a legal citizen of a country, but it doesn’t make you a member of the nation. If I were granted a Chinese passport, it wouldn’t make me Chinese, no matter how long I lived in that country and however well I managed to speak the language and adapt to its social mores.
The representative democracies that are characteristic of Western countries can function only if there is some basic, common, shared sense of identity and in which voters exercise their votes in a way they believe to be best for their countries. But if, as in the recent dramatic Garton by-election in the UK, voters vote along religious or ethnic lines, then our so-called representative democracies are in trouble.
How are our democracies supposed to respond when their voters split along ethno-religious lines? As Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore wrote, when rejecting the standard parliamentary model of democracy for Singapore, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
It is foolish beyond permission for Western countries to be profligate with the award of citizenship to all and sundry on the basis of minimal criteria. Long ago, St Thomas Aquinas wrote that among the Jews, “when any foreigners wished to be admitted entirely to their fellowship and mode of worship…a certain order was observed. For they were not at once admitted to citizenship: just as it was law with some nations that no one was deemed a citizen except after two or three generations, as the Philosopher (Aristotle) says (Politics iii, 1). The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst, many dangers might occur, since the foreigners not yet having the common good firmly at heart might attempt something hurtful to the people.” (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 105, a. 3, c)
Every individual human being, made in the image and likeness of God, deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, but when it comes to the economic, social, cultural and political implications of mass immigration, it isn’t individuals that matter, but numbers—numbers matter.