How Ireland became a cauldron of the culture war

On one side there were thousands of working-class people waving the Irish tricolour and belting out the Irish national anthem. On the other there was a gaggle of Trinity thin kids and sun-starved lefties, the kind of people who put the soy into socialism. One was a witch (she / they) who was there to ‘protest against Nazi cunts’. They chanted about ‘revolution’ yet it looked like a strong gust of wind might take them out. ‘32 counties, 69 genders’, said one banner, which I think means they want a United Ireland in which people with cocks get to cosplay as lesbians. Ah, just as Pádraic Pearse envisioned.

This was Dublin on Saturday. There was a huge protest against the government’s immigration policy, and a counter-protest of self-styled radicals chanting ‘Refugees welcome here’. And it was about the most perfect distillation of the ‘culture war’ I’ve ever seen. Crowds of working people rallying behind the national flag as the virtuous of Dublin 4 flipped a collective middle finger at them and branded them fascist scum. There it was, in glorious technicolor, the great clash of our time: that between ordinary people worried about mass immigration, and an elevated class of high-status opinion-havers for whom borders are so 20th century.

The main protest was against the immigration policy overseen by both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in recent years. Immigration is the hottest topic in Ireland right now. Swarms of Irish people are both bemused and troubled that Ireland’s foreign-born population is heading towards a fifth of the whole population. They’ve watched as sleepy green towns have become 35 per cent foreign-born almost overnight. No, they’re not racist, just curious: curious to know how this happened, why it happened, and whether they get a say in it.

The other side, the counter-protesters, could not have been more different. They were rallied by United Against Racism, a leftish group backed by Sinn Fein, the Greens and others in Dublin’s noisy virtue-displaying class. They waved the trans flag rather than the tricolour, because apparently the right of men to shit next to women is more important than the right of nations to self-determination. The words ‘fascists fuck off’ were scrawled on one trans flag, beautifully capturing the seething animus these snobs disguised as radicals feel for Dubliners who’ve never darkened the door of a university and probably think there are only two genders.

Where the big demo was a sea of tricolours, the counter-demo was full of the accoutrements of the neo-religion of woke. People were adorned in the keffiyeh, the Arab garment appropriated by the bourgeois of the West to signal their moral fitness for polite society. The Pride flag fluttered, because to this new class of faux-progressive individual identity matters far more than national identity. It was a clash of two moral universes, the green, white and gold of the tricolour signalling an affinity with the nation, the multicolours of Pride signalling a preference for the neoliberal cult of self-regard.

One couldn’t help but be struck by the look of the counter-protesters. It was like the before picture in an ad for Vitamin D supplements. There was also green hair, witch hats, many a middle finger raised in bourgeois fury. It was a nightmarish vision of what ‘left’ now means. I’m old enough to remember when ‘the left’ was basically working-class people arguing for better pay and nicer lives – now it’s become a kind of playpen for the most unemployable, unhinged muppets in society. The Dublin fops chanted about ‘class struggle’ without once pausing to wonder how they came to spend a Saturday screaming ‘Nazis’ at working-class people. Oh, you’re in class struggle all right, you’re just not on the side you think you are.

This is not to say the tricolour-waving side was all salt of the earth. I’m sure most of them were decent folk concerned about immigration, rather than antsy about immigrants. But there were certainly smatterings of the far right. There was also a banner showing Conor McGregor with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – that was as nuts as anything on the counter-protesting side. You need better heroes.

But in a way, it was less the content of the gatherings than the contrast between them that was most striking. One side expressed pride in the country, the other pride in the self. One was enamoured with a certain vision of the nation, the others were more enamoured with their own navels. One talked about ‘preserving the republic’, the other seemed far more concerned with presenting an image of themselves as perfectly ethically correct – anti-racist, pro-Palestine, still believing in scores of genders.

These were the Two Irelands. There was the working-class Ireland that worries about the destruction of borders, not because it is xenophobic but because it cares about nation and democracy. Indeed, it is nationhood that makes citizenship real, that gives meaning to democracy itself. Without a strong sense of nationhood, what becomes of the Irish people? Are they just boarders on a nice island? And there was the professional-managerial Ireland, that class of people who derive their social power less from national institutions than from the hoarded virtue of the globalist elites. They prefer the Pride flag to the tricolour because it lets the world know they’ve moved beyond the archaic concerns of nations and now dwell in the realm of the gold-collared superclass where ethics matter more than country.

We see this divide across the West now. There are likewise Two Englands, Two Americas, Two Frances – old nations divided by new tensions that pit a working class tied to territory against an upper class that has freed itself of such old-world folly. It is especially intense in Ireland, which has become something of a cauldron of the culture war, perhaps because nationhood is a recent accomplishment there. Indeed, the clash of the Two Irelands took place during the 109th anniversary of the Easter Rising that birthed the Irish republic. It seems the Irish people are happy to make themselves a fly in the globalist ointment by saying that the ideals the men of 1916 died for still matter.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy