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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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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.

A senator has spoken out against the new hate speech bill.

I went to a protest today organised by the Irish Freedom Party. (I've never voted for one of their candidates in a general election before, but given that every major party, including the Greens for whom I usually vote, has backed this piece of legislation, I may have no choice come the next general election.)

The more I hear about this bill the more it draconian it sounds. Literally any police officer, regardless of rank, can tell a judge "I believe so-and-so possesses materials likely to promote violence or hatred against a person or group on the basis of their protected characteristics" and the judge can grant a search warrant. This search warrant gives the police license to search the person's home (using force if necessary), search the property of any person present in that person's home, force the person in question to hand over the passwords for any electronic devices in their possession, and seize anything they so choose from that person's home.

What I find most frustrating about this is that I'm quite confident that if I told an Irish person, in 2019, that Trump was trying to pass a piece of legislation intended to grant sweeping powers to the police to anyone suspected of collusion with Islamic terrorist groups, they'd say it was grotesquely Orwellian insanity. But because this legislation is being proposed with the ostensible goal of combatting racism and transphobia, the response has been a collective shrug (there were a mere ~500 people at the protest today). "Just don't be a cunt and you'll be fine" according to one denizen of /r/ireland.

I'll have to look into the Irish Freedom Party. I was pleasantly surprised with how intelligent Justin Barret seemed in his interview with Keith Woods but a National Party protest doesn't seem like something you'd want to risk showing your face at.

Some of the speakers went a little off-topic and the party as a whole does seem to be anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-LGBT (not just T-sceptical).

Who is Keith Woods?