Last night, as some readers may know, I was on Virgin Media’s Tonight Show to discuss, amongst other things, immigration policy in Ireland. I have always enjoyed appearing on that programme, from its earliest days under Vincent Browne, and the team there are always very professional and kind. Judging by the feedback I received, many people seemed to think I performed reasonably creditably. So, it seems, did Ruth Coppinger, for this afternoon she sent the following tweet about me:
In case it needs to be said – and it wouldn’t, to anyone who has ever read a single word I have written – I have never called the former US President, Barack Obama, “a monkey”. Nor would I. Nor have I ever called Nelson Mandela the n-word. The latter accusation refers to a tweet I sent mocking Gerry Adams for describing a movie character in Django Unchained as “a Ballymurphy N****r”, and was my jocular way of pointing out that Adams would never have used that word to describe Mandela. That Adams would have known, in other words, that what he was saying was outrageous.
Adams actually did use the N-word to refer to a black person. Deputy Coppinger has never, to my knowledge, called for him to be de-platformed.
In the “monkey” tweet she referenced, dug up from the year 2010, the “monkey” reference was to George W. Bush, who was routinely in the early 2000’s parodied by left-wing Guardian newspaper cartoonist Steve Bell as a man with chimpanzee type features, as can be seen here. And here. The “vegetable” is Al Gore, who by 2010 was famous or infamous, depending on your point of view, for his advocacy of Green causes. It was in the context of a conversation about the US Presidential election of the year 2000.
Little did I know, making that throwaway jocular remark 15 years ago, that it would become the focus of a smear of staggering dishonesty a decade and a half later because Ruth Coppinger didn’t like that I was on television.
Which is, of course, the point. Read her tweet again and note that she is not actually condemning me at all: She is condemning Virgin Media.
“Why is he getting a platform?”, she asks.
That reveals the truth of the matter, really: Had I not been on television, expressing an opinion she did not like, she would not have sent a tweet calling me a racist. Had I simply shut up, she would not have called me a racist. The proximate cause for her accusation of racism – sourced from two tweets she appears to have misunderstood, sent 15 years ago – is that I was on television saying things of which she disapproves.
As to the question of “why I got a platform”, I would submit that it is not unusual for writers from publications on the scale of Gript Media to be given media platforms in Ireland. We have thousands of subscribers and an online audience that compares favourably to The Journal or The Examiner. Certainly, we have a larger audience than the “Hope and Courage” collective, which was also featured on the programme. That group is a taxpayer funded lobby shop for left-wing causes which has 819 followers on the largest social media platform, as opposed to Gript Media’s 101,398.
Now, one of the reasons people think I “did well” on the programme is, I think, reasonably obvious: It is because I was outnumbered three to one, as is customary for almost anybody on Irish media programmes advocating a view in opposition to the progressive-left consensus. When you are outnumbered three to one, and perform at a basically credible level and don’t lose, some people will happily mistake you for Cicero reborn. Because you are supposed to lose. That’s your job. When Laura was on the same show a few weeks ago, she wrote about what it was like to be outnumbered three to one. This is the standard. In an ideal world, the role of the conservative or right-leaning guest on an Irish media programme is to be re-educated in real time for the benefit of the audience. You are there to be shown the error of your ways – not for your own benefit but for the benefit of viewers at home who need to know that their views are not the correct ones.
Deputy Coppinger would go further, as she says. She would have people like me banished from the airwaves altogether, since there is no room in her version of Ireland at all for wrong-thinkers.
What’s more, wrong-thinkers must be destroyed. Personally. Professionally. Reputationally. If you happen to find yourself agreeing with anything I said on Tuesday night, you are supposed to reflect on the fact that you were agreeing with a racist. The point of the personal destruction of me is not actually personal at all: It is for the re-education of everybody else.
This is the same broad attitude that has made large elements of the Irish body politic comfortable with applying the “far right” smear to almost any person or community in the country with concerns about immigration. Sometimes they will be fair minded: If communities are not “far right” themselves, then they have fallen victim to “far right misinformation”. Decipher this and you’ll see what is actually being said: These working class communities may not be Nazis themselves, they’re just too stupid to know that they have been made a pawn by the Nazis.
That is why, as I said on the show, no NGO ever calls for community engagement with people in middle class areas like Ballsbridge who oppose Asylum Centres. Nobody would ever imagine that the well-to-do burghers of Ballsbridge would be taken in by the “far right”. That’s only for the thicks in places like Coolock, or Drumshambo .
The point of all of this is to make you afraid. To make you afraid to air your views in public in any forum, be it a public meeting or a television programme. The more polite and articulate you are, the more viciously you must be derided as “far right” or a racist. Paradoxically, the more brutish and rough you are in how you speak, the less likely it is you’ll be called “far right” – in that case you’ll just be a poor fool who has come under the malign influence of other “far right” people.
This is also why Deputy Coppinger, a few weeks ago, called other reporters “pathetic” for defending this outlet’s right to even ask questions of politicians. The point there, again, was to make them afraid: Did they want to side with the wrong-thinkers? What would that say about their character?
Thankfully, the journalists in question saw through the charade.
To be fair to the body politic as a whole, there is general consent that even though people like me are unspeakably wrong, a democracy requires that we be allowed on television, if only to be publicly dressed down for our wrongness. That has been David Quinn’s job for years in Ireland – the fella they let on television so that presenters can exercise their criminally under-utilised raised eyebrows and instinct for a sharp question, skills which would atrophy if they only ever interviewed liberal politicians and NGO types.
Coppinger however would go further. In her Ireland, there would be no dissent on the television. Or the radio. Or the internet. In the place of dissent, there would simply be an armada of the same voices, relentlessly talking about deprivation and the need for more resources and the need to “inoculate” people against the disease of the “far right”.
As I have written on these pages in the past, Ireland has a critical NGO problem. Take the housing crisis: In 2023, the combined income – almost all of it from the taxpayer – of Irish charities and NGOs devoted to solving the homelessness problem was a cool €137million. Collectively, those organisations employed 1,774 people. That is a spend of €25,000 for every homeless person in Dublin that year, and one staff member for every three homeless people. These organisations get simply incredible resources.
But of course, they do not solve homelessness. If they were measured on effectiveness, we’d close them all up. But that would have consequences for their mainly middle class staff, whose generous salaries depend on the state “resourcing” homelessness. Thus, we live in a country where we spend €25,000 per year, per homeless person, and the number of homeless continues to grow regardless, as does the number of people paid to deal with it. Soon we may have more people employed to tackle homelessness than we actually have homeless people.
This is a farce. Speak out against it, though, and you threaten the jobs of thousands of people. All of whom depend, for their living, on your taxes. It is no wonder that they call you a racist, or want you to shut up.
If you challenge this racket, expect to be defamed. I do not particularly care about being defamed, because, frankly, to be defamed by Deputy Coppinger is a badge of honour. Her rage and her anger at my existence, frankly, is all the evidence I need that shutting up would be exactly the wrong thing to do.