Some years ago, I remember being told by a very intelligent priest that the United Nations reminded him of Sunday Mass. The point he was making was a cynical one: Many people go to mass on a Sunday and listen to the sermon about greed and envy, before going right back home to continue a family feud about who got more than they did in a deceased relative’s will. Or they listen to the beatitudes about being blessed if they are pure in heart, before going right back home to continue coveting their neighbour’s wife and goods.
The same pattern, my priest friend said, occurs at the United Nations, where countries gather together to pledge peace and harmony and good will, before going right back home to continue their record of human rights abuse and warring against their neighbours.
I was thinking of that reading the latest UN Agreement, ratified at the UN Assembly this week. For example, on page 58 of the “pact for the future”, we are told that all nations shall “Promote international stability, peace and security, whereby conflicts and crises are resolved through peaceful means.”
This was signed up to by, amongst others, the Russians, the Israelis, the Lebanese, the Saudis, Sudan, and Burkina Faso, all of which are amongst those countries currently resolving conflicts or crises by means that an objective observer might struggle to call peaceful.
This is perhaps the defining quality of UN agreements: They are observed and enforced, as a general rule, by those who least need to observe or enforce them, and ignored by those at whom they are – on paper at least – targeted.
This latest one – the pact for the future – is so generically liberal and progressive that it might well have been written by an Oireachtas Committee chaired by the Social Democrats after an array of submissions from Irish NGOs. It talks about climate change and climate justice. It talks about gender equality. It talks about a world “free from Nuclear weapons”. It talks about the dangerous misuse of social media and misinformation and disinformation.
It is, in short, the kind of well-meaning pie-in-the-sky piffle that generically emerges from United Nations summits. Were we all Americans, I would simply advise readers to ignore it – as that country surely and certainly will. “A world free from nuclear weapons”, indeed.
But we are not Americans. We are instead citizens of one of those very serious countries that takes UN declarations and resolutions as seriously as 17-year-olds do when they’ve just solved world hunger and world peace at the model United Nations. Thus, the contents of the agreement pose far more threat to the liberties and freedoms of an Irish citizen than they do to somebody living in Shootemup’ Mississippi, or in the heart of former Imperial Russia.
As such, even the blandest and most aspirational objectives in this new document should cause those of us who live under the spirit-crushing tyranny of Irish NGO-land to be wary. For example, on page 25 the new UN document commits the world to:
Integrate a human rights perspective into regulatory and normsetting processes for new and emerging technologies and call on the private sector to respect human rights and uphold ethical principles in the development and use of new and emerging technologies.
To understand the threat here, you must first speak fluent progressive-ese. So, for example, “a human rights perspective” does not simply – in the hands of someone like Ivana Bacik – include those things we might have traditionally regarded as fundamental human rights – life, liberty, security, freedom of conscience, and so on. It will also include much more modern and insidious interpretations, such as the right not to experience racism or transphobia. Telling an Irish Government – and more pertinently an Irish civil service – drunk on wokeism that it must “integrate a human rights perspective into regulatory processes for new technology” is just signaling to it that it now has a United Nations human rights obligation to consider mandatory censorship of things that might make some people feel “unsafe”.
Or for example, on page 59, we are told that members must
“Strengthen cooperation among States to ensure safe, orderly and regular migration between countries of origin, transit and destination, including through enhancing and diversifying the availability and flexibility of pathways for regular migration, while recognizing the positive contributions of migrants to inclusive growth and sustainable development.”
This would not, I suspect, prevent a President Trump from building his wall and asking Mexico very nicely if they might pay for it, should he ever get around to that. Nor would it prevent the Australians from turning back the boats. Nor might it dissuade the entirety of the Arab world from their long-standing view that refugees fleeing middle-eastern wars are Europe’s problem, and not the Middle East’s.
What it is likely to do, however, is persuade Irish academics that there are yet more human rights obstacles to any kind of moderation of immigration policy here in Ireland. We could go on and cite more examples, but you get, I hope, the general point I am making at this stage.
The problem, in essence, is not these pie-in-the-sky UN declarations, which most countries adopt and ignore at will. The problem is very particular to Ireland, and to a lesser extent the rest of Europe: Best-boy-in-the-classism.
This in turn poses a particular threat to the rest of the world because the global tech sector, in its wisdom or folly, has chosen to headquarter many of its operations here, which makes those operations subject to Irish regulation and Irish law.
There are those I know – they emailed me, which is why I’m writing this piece – who will regard Ireland’s signing up to this particular agreement as some kind of egregious violation of sovereignty and a decision that far exceeds any mandate given to the Government at the last election. It is not any of those things – as I say, the French also signed up to it, but the world might be waiting a while for France to abandon its nuclear weapons, regardless of what the document says.
There’s a tendency in Ireland, and amongst some of the public, to blame the foreigners and their treaties for various outcomes that we dislike. But the religious service allegory works very well.
Most people who go to mass – or church, or synagogue, or mosque, I assume – are in some way or other, sinners who parse their church’s teachings and ignore those things that don’t suit them. Some people who go practcie their religion, by contrast, quietly do their best.
And then there’s the third kind: The publicly pious holy Joe or Josephine who consciously or otherwise tries to shame everybody else of their faith by living a life of public piety.
If the United Nations is Sunday Mass for the world’s nations, then Ireland is the lad in the front row, there an hour early, prostrating himself before the Altar. That problem is ours, not the UN’s.