Mr Foley-Walsh (far left) with Fine Gael members at a pro-life rally in Dublin. Liberal Ireland is working hard to find enemies, writes John McGuirk
Something happened last week that was extraordinary, but before I talk about it, it is necessary to remind ourselves of a few things about the country that we live in.
Let us start with the fact that four short years ago, Ireland became the first country in history to legalise marriages between two men, or two women, by popular vote. The vote was overwhelmingly in favour. Let us remember also that last year, this country, once amongst the most socially conservative in the western world, had a referendum on abortion, and the result wasn’t even close.
I highlight those two facts, but I could talk about many more in addition. By any measure, liberalism in Ireland is utterly ascendant. The country does not have a viable conservative political movement or party – and I do not confine my definition of conservative to just social issues when I say that.
On everything from transgender rights to paternity leave, or from Brexit to Climate Change, Ireland’s politics is almost completely in line with the views of the Guardian newspaper or the New York Times. Mainstream western liberalism – the politics of the American Democrats and Amnesty Ireland – is totally in charge here, and almost unchallenged. Those few of us who dissent on any of those policies are in a minority, and saying so is not defeatism, or trying to claim a mantle of victimhood. It’s just a fact.
Speeches
This week, we had the extraordinary case of the two young people from Fine Gael’s youth wing who had the opportunity to attend a conservative political conference in the USA and took it.
They travelled to Washington, met with the US Vice President, Mr Pence, listened to a few speeches, and came home to find themselves headline news.
Three senior figures in their own party were calling on them to resign. Left wing activists on social media were calling on them – completely seriously – to be added to terrorist watch lists. One national newspaper was comparing them to the white supremacist terrorist who shot all those people dead in El Paso, Texas.
When this kind of thing happens, I have to pinch myself for a moment to ask if it’s real, and if it’s actually happening, and if Ireland actually is governed – culturally and politically – by a bunch of people so totally insecure in their own dominance that they feel threatened because two young people might – and I stress ‘might’ – disagree with them?
Imagine, for a moment, that this was your child. Imagine your 22-year-old son or daughter came to you and said that they had been given a chance to attend a conference in Washington and meet the US Vice President. Would you be ashamed of them, or proud? Would you tell them to stay at home, or would you tell them that it’s a rare opportunity and that they should go?
How would you feel, if, having told them that they should go, you suddenly found the Irish media comparing them to terrorists for shaking the hand of the deputy leader of the free world? Would you think that was fair and normal, or would you think these people were insane?
Ireland’s liberal revolutionaries have slayed all their enemies, and now they need more. That’s why so much of their energy these days is devoted to finding new heretics”
There’s an edge and an anger and an intellectual insecurity to Irish liberal politics at the moment that is utterly remarkable, and completely out of sync with the dominant standing of liberalism in the country. The frantic need to condemn two very young people in politics for the crime of even meeting with those who hold a different view to their party; and the hunger for absolute conformity from journalists and politicians are not the signs of a ruling class at ease with itself.
Blueprints
In trying to understand it, I think the key thing to observe about Irish liberalism today is that it has almost nobody, and nothing, left to blame. Gay people in Ireland are not discriminated against. Young women aren’t denied abortions if that’s what they desire. There’s no Fr Ted or Fr Dougal standing outside a cinema denouncing films – the only people doing that these days are the so-called liberals themselves.
This is, in short, their Ireland. They made it. They own it. It has been rebuilt almost entirely, from the ground up, using their blueprints.
All revolutionaries need an enemy. When the French revolutionaries had chopped off all the heads of the nobility, they required new enemies, and thus began ‘the terror’, when any and every enemy of the revolution was denounced and executed. When the communists got rid of the Romanovs in Russia, they then turned on ordinary Russians. There are many more examples, and I have too few words on this page to list them all.
Ireland’s liberal revolutionaries have slayed all their enemies, and now they need more. That’s why so much of their energy these days is devoted to finding new heretics. The columnist, Kevin Myers. The broadcaster, George Hook. The novelist, John Boyne. In recent years, all of them have been denounced and de-platformed for crimes against liberal thought.
Now we have moved on to young people who go to a conference that liberals don’t like.
At some point, Irish liberals will have to come to terms that none of their enemies are the true root of their unhappiness and their anger. After all, this is their country. They built it themselves. And they’re quickly, and obviously, running out of other people to blame.