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Notes -
Culture War in Ireland
The Enoch Burke saga is coming to a close, with the courts deciding not to prosecute him for trespass for repeatedly showing up at the school he was fired from over a dispute about gender pronouns (he aggressively questioned the principal on the matter and she claimed it was assault, it's not clear what really happened), though his fines have reached 74,000 euro and he has already spent time in jail for contempt of court. The Burke family are conservative activists so this wasn't just about him trying to get his job back, he was trying to draw attention to the issue and he succeeded massively given that this is the first big news item I can think of regarding this issue in Ireland. The principal has apparently quit in the meantime so I guess he can count that as a personal victory.
There was some violence around a refugee encampment this week as right-wing protestors clashed with socialists. A Turkish man came out and shouted 'this is my country' as the right-wingers were tearing down 'No War But Class War' signs and swung at them with a metal pole before getting beaten up. Apparently the Turk is deemed a terrorist by the Turkish government and he spent some time in Poland before coming to Ireland. It looks like the encampment has since been destroyed as the right-wingers burned it down in the night. Not the first time people have burned down asylum seeker accomodation but the other instances were in small towns rather than in the middle of Dublin. The police weren't present for any of this but I'm guessing we'll see some arrests down the line, though a lot of the people involved look like minors so I doubt there'll be real jailtime.
Sinn Féin have dropped their pledge to withdraw from NATO and EU defence agreements if they ever get into power. As far as I am aware all big parties are now pro-NATO and Ireland might end up joining at some point. Neutrality was once something we took pride in, and something that the Irish left valued especially, but the malleability in response to current trends that was exemplified by the lockdowns seems to only be accelerating. One consequence of joining NATO might be British troops training in Ireland, maybe we'll even see the Parachute Regiment show their face under a Sinn Féin government. I see this scenario as being much more inflammatory than the Brexit border issue but that risk isn't discussed in the media. The paramilitaries are basically incompetent nowadays but having obvious and hated targets appear can only help them.
A senator has spoken out against the new hate speech bill. Senators don't really have any power in Ireland (we had a referendum a few years back on abolishing the Seanad altogether) so it probably won't come to anything, but it's certainly another tributary in what could become an organised opposition to the way things are going.
Really? I could well be mistaken, but I was under the impression that, while not inclined to be particularly favourably disposed to the British armed forces, nor were the Irish notably supportive of nationalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and the anti-British feeling was only virulent among northern nationalists, not especially any more among Irish themselves. Even if it weren't, these things can't exert influence forever. You'd have be, what, pushing 70 to be 18 at the time of Bloody Sunday?
The two main political parties in Ireland are Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. They (or their predecessors) have been 1st and 2nd in every Irish Parliamentary election (Ireland uses PR) since independence, except for 2011 (when Labour pushed Fianna Fail into 3rd) and 2020 (when Sinn Fein, FF and FG all got about the same number of seats). A non-diaspora Irishman would be able to explain the true horror better than I, but their policies on social and economic issues are basically the same establishment centre-right slop. They are famously "as different as shit and shite". Why do two separate parties exist? Because FG historically favoured normalising relationships with the UK, whereas FF favoured developing an Irish national identity based on anti-Britishness - which hit peak cringe with De Valera's letter of condolence to Admiral Donitz after the death of Hitler.
Anti-Britishness is sufficiently controversial in Ireland that for most of the 20th century it was able to replace economic and social issues as the main driver of a two-party system - even though Duverger's Law says that Ireland shouldn't even have a two-party system at all because it uses PR.
"What is the difference between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael?"
"We win more elections" - W.B. O'Carolan, Fianna Fail senator.
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