The Questions Dublin Won’t Ask

Ireland took a break from its usual pastime of Israel-bashing to recoil in horror at the near-beheading by a Sudanese “asylum seeker” of a man in Belfast. Naturally, nobody in the Republic remarked that this had been a one-man imitation of what happened to Israel on October 7, 2023, though now the victim has survived, unlike the 1,300 Jews and non-Jews who were slaughtered on that terrible day. Nor did anyone in the media or politics ask this simple question: How did the assailant manage to fly from Paris, which is not apparently governed by totalitarian Islamophobes, and pass through security at Dublin Airport without a visa before being granted asylum?

Perhaps via the same system that had admitted Algerian Riad Bouchaker, who in 2023 ran amok in the centre of Dublin stabbing a group of little girls, leaving one paralysed, non-verbal, and permanently brain-damaged. Bouchaker’s trial was beginning when the attack in Belfast occurred. He does not deny responsibility but claims he was not of right mind, having been denied social welfare benefits that he thought were his right. 

That attack and its bizarre excuse should have caused alarm amongst Ireland’s political classes. Instead, they have been obsessing about events in Gaza, about which they can do nothing, while ignoring the consequences of what has become an almost uncontrolled immigration into a country that they purport to govern. In part, this is because of the extraordinary power of the many non-governmental organisations that, despite their name, are government-subsidised instruments for influencing public opinion. Such NGOs—usually called QUANGOs, from the addition of “quasi-autonomous”—have historically had a profound effect on popular perceptions, especially within media outlets. These have effectively quashed open discussion on issues such as immigration, housing shortages, the health system, homelessness and race. 

This silence gives the impression of an island at peace with itself, whereas there is a seething unrest in working-class areas over the unsought and largely imposed changes in their communities. Any expressions of discontent are immediately denounced by the government-subsidised media as ‘racist,’ ‘far-right,’ or bizarrely, the work of the Ku Klux Klan. Though this outfit is effectively dead in the USA, it nonetheless flourishes in the imagined psychodramas with which the southern Irish media are obsessed. They have been joined in their self-righteous hallucinations by Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, which—with its allies—was responsible for 60% of all murders during the Irish Troubles, 1970-2003. When not denouncing the violence of Northern Ireland Protestants, Sinn Féin still publicly proclaims its pride in atrocities committed by the IRA.   

Within the Protestant, pro-British minds of Northern Ireland, comparable delusions have created comparably toxic results, including attacks on the homes of law-abiding and economically productive immigrants. These terms generally do not apply to their assailants, though ‘stupidity’ certainly does. Nobody should ever under-estimate the social power of the loudly brainless, especially in the economically and educationally deprived communities of Northern Ireland. The province is entombed in the permafrost of an imposed peace that nobody likes but, in equal measure, no one is prepared to thaw by resorting to organised violence for fear of what sabre-toothed monsters might possibly emerge from the melting ice.

The Republic is vastly different, not least because, next month, it assumes the presidency of the Council of the European Union, to which Northern Ireland—being part of the United Kingdom—does not belong. Ireland prides itself on being ‘good Europeans,’ unlike—by whispered implication—the nasty British. The Irish already enjoy a derogation from the common laws on corporation taxes within the EU, enabling the Republic to become a major centre of U.S. industry. It cannot now demand a tightening of the EU laws on ‘asylum-seekers’ without imperilling its reputation as Europe’s good Anglophone country, which is no doubt why the Dublin government has stayed astonishingly silent over the attempted murder by a man who had no right to be in Ireland yet whom it allowed to pass through its main airport.

As every country in the EU now knows, this is an issue that will not go away. The union is politically and socially incapable of admitting, never mind assimilating, the millions of people from Africa and northwest Asia who want to avail themselves of the economic benefits and the generous welfare systems Europe provides. Ireland has run perhaps the laxest of immigration regimes within the EU, largely because of the political and cultural influences of the NGOs. Rather like the communist party in the former Soviet Union, these are too deeply entrenched and politically powerful to be dissolved by merely government decree. They also appear to confirm Ireland’s ethical superiority over other countries. especially that of its nearest neighbour and the only state with which it shares a land border, the United Kingdom. 

Ireland’s immigration problems cannot be legislated away while its political classes purport to be the most moral in Europe. Of course, it is easy to lecture Israel about Gaza when words do not have to be matched with deeds. Furthermore, controlling inward population flow is an almost impossible challenge for a state that genuinely believes itself to be—no matter how absurdly—a moral leader of Europe  and which has accordingly created a voluble chorus of state-subsidised NGOs to plainchant that fiction. No straitjackets are as tight as those devised by their wearers to protect their defining vanities.