The very intentional slight by President Higgins to the Unionist people by personally refusing to attend the centenary commemorations of the foundation of the Northern State is an event of enormous significance. It marks the capture of the centre-ground of Irish life by the Sinn Fein value-system, which boycotts rather than seeks any accommodation with alternative forms of Irishness.
“Ourselves Alone” now finally means just that.
This identity-fascism has not just conquered the Aras. Many of you will have read Larissa Nolan’s preposterous but nonetheless important paean to the Sfira alliance in The Sunday Independent. This recycled what was already old hat, Desmond Fennell’s claim from 1983 that the Irish people lived in perpetual cultural thrall to British cultural values, by which dispensation anything Irish must by definition be inferior to anything British.
If anyone really believed that nonsense back then, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the peace process, the exchange of state visits between Irish and British heads of state, Ryanair, the Celtic Tiger, the international impact of Irish celebrities in literature, music, film and television, has killed it stone-dead.
Yet now in 2021, that fiction has been dug from its well-deserved grave and reincarnated as an all-explaining truth, and in The Sunday Independent, no less. For decades, this newspaper was the foremost opponent of the Sfira campaign, which itself depended on an alliance of deliberate historical falsehood and a complete disregard for human morality. By the miracles of peace process voodoo, these have now been transubstantiated into some bogus solutions of our problems and Manson-like declarations of innocence for past deeds. Moreover, such vapourings are no longer confined to An Phoblacht-Republican News but now grace the pages of the former enemy of everything that Sfira stood for, The Sunday Independent.
If that doesn’t scare the living daylights out of you, then you too are in the grip of peace process voodoo. This is the witchcraft that enables Sfira to declare that it alone has the cure for our housing problems, even though these cannot possibly be solved within an open-door European Union that insists on the free movements of EU citizens. Sfira’s “solutions” to Ireland’s crisis are as meaningless as a Dail vote over the Dollymount tides. While we have a growing economy and uncontrolled immigration, we’ll always have a housing crisis.
Moreover, only voodoo would enable Sfira supporters to declare that all our other problems lie with the colonial oppressors and their enduring influence over our mindset. For quite clearly, that odious duo, Varadkar and Coveney, as well as The Irish Times, RTE and every comedian and bar-room bore, have spent the past half-decade mocking everything about Brexit Britain, whereas our membership of the EU apparently sets us above the “parochial” preoccupations of the British. Within Irish political culture, the most ridiculous person in Europe is not the human catastrophe that is the European President Ursula von der Leyen, but the marginally less absurd British prime minister Boris Johnson. The major sporting talking point of this summer-autumn was not the defeat of the BandI Lions in South Africa but the triumph of Tyrone and Limerick in GAA codes.
So there is, quite simply, absolutely no sense of Irish inferiority towards our former imperial master: if anything, the very reverse is the case – yet we are nonetheless told, courtesy of an essay that was written by a hypocritical woman-grabbing windbag some four decades ago, that the Irish despise everything about themselves and revere everything about the British.
We all know this isn’t so, and only studied dishonesty or a cognitive dissonance on LSD could give such a fantasy substance. But this nonetheless is the voodoo spell that the Sfira alliance exercises over the electorate, which Nolan bizarrely calls “true republicanism”.
True republicanism does not depend on the bloodied Fenian mythologies of Sfira but on a scrupulous and secular assessment of realities. It most certainly does not absolve political and paramilitary movements of moral responsibility for their bloody deeds. If some small measure of much-delayed justice was done for the Paras’ ruthless butchery in Derry and Ballymurphy, where is Sfira’s repentance, regret and contrition for hundreds of other atrocities, all of them intended and all of them proudly proclaimed at the time?
There has been none: and according to the Nolan doctrine, there is no reason for any, for unlike British crimes such as the Famine, the IRA’s campaign is all history, and we must now get on with a tomorrow in which Sinn Fein is the embodiment of true republicanism. And indeed, if psychotic amnesia is a fundamental requirement for true republicanism, then Sfira truly exemplifies republican virtues, just as its promise to solve complex problems with magical elixirs confirms its intellectual childishness.
The financial markets know the worthlessness of these elixirs. That terrible Monday morning in February last year after Sinn Fein almost won the general election, all inward investment in Ireland stopped. Every single negotiation with the IDA was suspended while foreign investors waited to see whether adults were going to be in charge of Ireland or a bunch of unrepentant terrorists with a nursery understanding of economics. Only extraordinarily lucky electoral numbers saved us from stewardship by murderous children.
Such widespread adult immaturity is, alas, merely an Irish form of a worldwide sickness: the infantilisation via social media of entire populations. The intellectual debasement of the USA gave the fictions of transgenderism and Black Lives Matter enormous traction within campuses, corporate America and the White House. The babyish mimicry that is central to social media then enabled the entire BLM package to be adopted overnight by the British establishment, but not, with the exception of the congenital idiots of the FAI, within Irish any sports, which in itself is a complete refutation of the Nolan argument.
After the coalition government was finally formed here, there existed a simple tool to establish the credibility of conventional politics: a knife. Ministerial, TD and civil servant pensions should have been slashed and a system of self-funding pensions for the entire administrative classes created. Instead, the very opposite happened: while much of the private economy collapsed, and the retail sector was gift-wrapped and handed over to the sociopath Jeff Bezos, the public service got not one but two pay rises, amid an orgy of self-congratulation. This was followed by a ludicrous system of teachers marking their own students’ Leaving Certificate papers, so they all qualified to be nuclear physicists or heart-transplant surgeons – but funnily enough, no plumbers, carpenters or bricklayers.
The culture of entitlement that has so long and so bizarrely infused Irish life (itself worthy of deep study) was typified by what happened next. A Canadian – who lives in New York, courtesy of an Irish government pension, and whose brief political career here in Ireland was distinguished by her uncanny ability to make phony expenses-claims and to stay resolutely silent on the principles of free speech (except on issues she agreed with) – was appointed to be Irish ambassador to the UN for, God help us, free speech. When this utterly farcical appointment – the equivalent of making Colin Farrell Minister for Chastity – collapsed, Fine Gael, the party that had made it behind the Taoiseach’s back, whinged that they were not stroke-pullers but decent honourable people doing their best for their country.
If Sfira wanted to design a government that was guaranteed to alienate the electorate, they’d look at the incompetent, self-regarding shower that is Fine Gael, with all their smug, piano-playing children called Emma and Conor studying for the bar and medicine, and say; that’ll do us nicely. Keep on doing what you’re doing and within a couple of years, we’ll own Special Branch and Army Intelligence and all the rest. And as for President, we’ll stick with the ould lad in the Park; he’s dead on, so he is.
I first wrote what follows ten years ago, as the Sinn Fein cult began to gather momentum. The only way now for accountable democracy in Ireland to survive is by making it a condition of membership of Dail Eireann that TDs swear an oath of loyalty to the Defence Forces and An Garda Siochana as the only bodies under any conditions entitled to bear arms in the name of the Republic.
Such measures are essential when covert-paramilitaries threaten a democracy from within. Had President Hindenburg insisted that Hitler disown the SA and SS as a condition of his becoming chancellor, Germany’s history would have been very different, For Hitler’s inevitable refusal would have ended his constitutional bid for government. So it is with Sinn Fein: it cannot sever its links with the IRA.
An elderly president once failed Germany, and another elderly president is now failing Ireland: our very own Higginsburg. Soon we might yet hear the stamp of marching feet as the Nazis’ last remaining allies in Europe draw closer and closer to power. And then, how long before the dawn raids begin on their opponents? Specifically, gentle readers, that very probably means you and me…..