At the time of writing on Thursday afternoon, the most-read story in that thunderous organ of Irish officialdom, The Irish Times, is a piece by that paper’s Europe Correspondent Naomi O’Leary worrying that the record of EU Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen risks “seriously damaging…the image of the EU in the country”.
It is a piece of writing very much in keeping with the general tenor of political discourse in Ireland: a political and journalistic establishment in a position of almost unassailable dominance which, nevertheless, manages to sound on a daily basis like the desperate defenders of Leningrad in the six hundredth day of the siege: For a moment you might forget that Eurobarometer polling constantly shows the Irish as the most pro-European people on (or perhaps, adjacent to) the continent. A few perceived mis-steps by a senior EU official is all it might take, the reader might be forgiven for thinking, for this country to suddenly swerve down the dark and ruinous road of Irexit after our reckless neighbours paved the path.
In reality, of course, nothing could be further from the truth: Yes, Irish officials are conspicuously out of step with the EU on the leading foreign policy controversy on earth at the moment, but euroscepticism remains in Ireland – for better or worse – one of those ideas that most people instinctively recoil from. Von Der Leyen could, if we were honest with ourselves, personally drive a tank through the Gaza strip without any meaningful risk of Ireland suddenly becoming a nation of convinced Eurosceptics. The position of the EU in Ireland is perfectly safe for the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, the fretting of the Irish Times is entirely in concert with the general psychology of establishment Ireland, as we approach the final days of 2023: Progressivism and liberalism are the dominant ideologies in Ireland, with no coherent or organised political opposition to their central tenets. While the Government might change at the next election, the changes on offer will be stylistic and managerial, not ideological: There is no prospect of any reimagining of the role of the state, or its relationship with the individual. There is no prospect of any serious foreign policy change. There is no prospect of any shift on social policy, or a weakening of the dominant position of charities and NGOs in the country’s “civil society”.
Nevertheless, to listen to establishment Ireland, one might think that the wolves were at the door, scratching and baying against a rotting doorframe, ready to consume and devour the poor liberals within. The “far right” is everywhere. Support for the EU might fall. The public are being led astray with hate speech. We are not doing enough on climate change. At times one might be forgiven for thinking that the country is one Conor McGregor tweet away from a widely-backed right-wing coup and the installation of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage as joint administrators of the island on behalf of the international forces of hate and division™.
What explains it, this constant panic? Two things, I think.
First, virtue can only exist where there is vice.
Irish liberalism has, by and large, slayed all the dragons, and its contemporary mouthpieces must feel a little bit like Roman Generals during the Pax Romana: All the barbarians of note had been conquered. There are no more tribes to subdue. The best that an ambitious young noble seeking glory can do in such times is to cross the border at the Rhine into Germany and beat up on some mud-hut dwellers on whatever pretext he can find to do so.
This is the position in which contemporary Irish progressives find themselves: Constantly in need of an enemy, and determined to find one at all costs. As such, some working-class fellow with a slightly dangerous accent mouthing off about the World Economic Forum on telegram will have to do. The conquest of that threat will have to be presented, psychologically, as being up there in the annals with the heroic triumph in the divorce referendum of 1995, when the forces of goodness just barely triumphed over the mighty armies of the Roman Church and ushered in our new era of compassion and kindness.
This constant need for a fight means that there is a constant need for more enemies. Worrying about the rise of euroscepticism in a country with 90% support for the EU is the best we can do, it seems, to place ourselves alongside brave progressives overseas fighting real threats, like Donald Trump or Geert Wilders.
The second factor is, I’d argue, small island syndrome. Irish liberal insecurity arises at least in part because – when it all comes down to it – Ireland doesn’t matter. What use is our purity if we are surrounded by an ocean of Trumps and Farages and Wilders, or live in a world where Netanyahu wins his war?
In this sense, the insecurity is an almost perfect mirror of Catholic insecurity in the 1950s and 60s, when there was an almost bone-tingling fear of the depravity of the world entering the Irish bloodstream and corrupting our comely maidens. We must be purer than pure, when surrounded by such moral degeneracy. John Charles McQuaid and Eamon Ryan have this much in common: They both desired, or desire, Ireland to be a beacon of virtue to a fallen globe.
In both cases, the sense of siege is approaching, in the best traditions of Ireland, the hysterical. Progressivism will eventually fall in Ireland, as some new idea comes into fashion. But it is at no imminent threat of collapsing. The rest of the world does not care enough about us. And even if a fifth column were somehow to succeed in taking control of the state, it would still have to reckon with the academics. And the journalists. And the courts. And the NGOs. And the armada of middle-class people in middle-class estates who consider themselves fearsome intellectuals on account of having read Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky in their youth.
The siege is in their heads.