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Consider a comment made last year from Professor Kathleen Lynch. The professor emerita of equality studies at University College Dublin stated that she was “ashamed to be Irish” because of the way asylum seekers are being treated. She was recently appointed to the Council of State by President Connolly. Emerita is the female version of the masculine emeritus. The term is often applied on an honorary basis to retired professors.
Lynch’s emerita status reminds me of the old yarn told about Frank Giles of the Times. Decades ago, he was appointed Editor Emeritus of the Times. Puzzled, he asked Rupert Murdoch – the man who had just removed him from operational duties to elevate him to this position – what “emeritus” meant. Legend has it that Murdoch replied “emeritus comes from Latin, Frank. E means you’re out. And Meritus means you deserve it”.
There is a question that ordinary Irish people have been asking with increasing urgency, and which our establishment class has met with increasing contempt: why does almost every lever of institutional power in this country — the national broadcaster, the universities, the NGO sector, the main political parties — push so relentlessly for mass immigration while simultaneously running down any expression of Irish national identity? Why is the person who waves a tricolour and says “enough” treated as a moral inferior, while the person who favours greater immigration is celebrated as enlightened?
The answer is not complicated, though it has been carefully obscured. To understand it, one need only listen to what members of the globalist elite have said, on the record, when they thought they were speaking among friends.
In June 2012, Peter Sutherland — Ireland’s most decorated son of the transnational order, former EU Commissioner, former WTO Director-General, and non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International — appeared before the House of Lords EU home affairs sub-committee. He told the committee that migration was a “crucial dynamic for economic growth” in some EU nations “however difficult it may be to explain this to the citizens of those states.”
That parenthetical phrase is worth pausing on. The citizens of democratic nations, it turns out, are something of an inconvenience — a problem of messaging rather than of legitimate concern. But Sutherland went further. He argued that European states “still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others” — and that this was precisely the problem.
The European Union, in his view, “should be doing its best to undermine” that sense of homogeneity.
There it is: not to manage migration sensibly, not to balance competing interests, but to undermine the cultural cohesion of European nations. This was not a slip of the tongue. It was the frank expression of a worldview held by an enormously powerful man who had spent his career operating at the summit of national and international institutions.
Why would any rational person want to dissolve national identity? The answer lies in what national identity does. It generates loyalty to a place and a people rather than to an abstraction. It creates the conditions for democratic accountability — a demos, a people, who can hold a government to account.
You cannot have genuine self-government without a self. A fragmented, atomised, post-national population, pulled in every direction by competing identities and lacking the social cohesion needed to act collectively, is a population that cannot effectively resist centralised technocratic governance. It cannot say no. It has no shared vocabulary with which to say it. Look at Northern Ireland for an example of a wholly ineffective demos.
This is the political logic that drives so much of what our establishment does, even when individual members of it are unaware of the larger pattern.
The promotion of mass immigration, the pathologizing of national sentiment, the relentless denigration of Irish culture and history — these are not random cultural preferences. They are the tools by which a population is softened for management by a managerial class that answers not to voters but to Brussels, to international bodies, to NGO networks funded by distant philanthropists.
Aldous Huxley saw this coming with remarkable clarity. Whereas Orwell’s 1984 offered the vision of humans crushed by totalitarianism, Huxley offered a vision of them being seduced by it.
In Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, Huxley wrote that by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, “the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism.
All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days.” Read those words again slowly. The forms of democracy preserved. The substance gutted.
Today the slogans — “European values,” “the rule of law,” “our democracy” — are maintained as weapons to use against those who resist. The language of liberalism is deployed not to protect freedom but to suppress dissent.
Those who object to the pace or scale of population replacement are labelled fascists, racists, far-right extremists. Once they have been thus labelled, their arguments can be sidelined – they do not need to be considered.
If you doubt that the people running these institutions care more about power than principle, consider what happened in late 2024 and early 2025. Thierry Breton, the former French minister who served as European Commissioner for the Internal Market, gave an interview in which he addressed the cancellation of Romania’s presidential election result — a result that had been annulled by the Romanian Constitutional Court under intense pressure from EU institutions after a candidate they disliked came out ahead.
Breton’s response was not embarrassment, nor equivocation. It was a statement of intent. Breton threatened to interfere in Germany’s national elections in the event of an AfD victory, stating: “we did it in Romania and of course we will have to do it, if necessary, in Germany.”
“We did it in Romania”. Consider that carefully. A former senior official of the European Commission — the body that lectures member states on democratic standards and the rule of law — casually admitted to having helped overturn an election result it didn’t like. And promised to do the same in the EU’s largest member state if necessary.
This week, right on cue, it emerged that the EU has just opened an investigation into Jordan Bardella (the right-wing candidate) now leading the polls to become next President of France.
This is not democracy. This is not the rule of law. This is the exercise of raw institutional power dressed up in the language of democracy and the rule of law. It is Orwellian in the most precise and literal sense: the words mean the opposite of what they appear to mean.
The few voices that question the consensus are not engaged with — they are ignored, no-platformed, sidelined.
In Ireland, we have our own version of this machinery. Our media does not ask the hard questions about what rapid demographic transformation means for social trust, for housing pressure, for the sustainability of public services. Instead, our politicians compete to demonstrate their fealty to our European overlords.
Sutherland called himself “a strong believer in European integration as the taming of nationalism.” He was candid about what integration was for. It was not an end in itself. It was a mechanism — for dissolving the nation-states that stand between the voter and the unelected official, between the citizen and the technocrat, between democracy and the unbridled operation of markets.
The Irish establishment has absorbed this project completely. They are not stupid people. They know what they are doing.
As Micheál Martin stated on May 11th, 2017, nine years ago this week, “Let there be no doubt about where Ireland stands: we want nothing to do with a backward-looking idea of sovereignty. We remain absolutely committed to the ideals of the European Union”.
Our establishment understands that a confident, cohesive Irish people with a strong sense of national identity and a functioning democracy is a people capable of saying “No”: No to the housing failures; No to the NGO racket; No to the supranational encroachments on sovereignty. The project is therefore making sure that such a people does not exist.
Our establishment is not interested in the values that made Europe great or in the successful drive towards civilisation that was built on property rights, on respect for family and community, on being harsh on the sin while forgiving the sinner, on the principle of merit and on the scientific method (of following what works over following ideology).
Our establishment today disregards traditional European values in its pursuit of power and in constructing the social conditions under which its power cannot be successfully challenged.
Run down the history. Pathologize the flag. Flood the zone with competing identities until the very concept of “the Irish people” becomes contested and incoherent. The quaint old forms will remain. The elections will be held. The Dáil will sit. The newspapers will endorse the right candidates. But the underlying substance will be, as Huxley foresaw, something else entirely.
The Irish people had better wake up before the door finally slams shut. Otherwise, we may have to live with Orwell’s dystopian 1984 vision: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”.
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