“New To The Parish” and the Irish Doomsday Clock
From the Irish Times “New to the Parish” series, here’s an Egyptian immigrant speaking about her recently acquired Irish citizenship:
“I haven’t changed one bit. I still carry the same ideas and principles I’ve developed over the years. But starting today, I can move. I am no longer subject to some authorities’ decision on whether or not I’m allowed to cross the border. Can’t help but wonder what was wrong with me before today? What’s wrong with the billions of people around the world who are trapped within their borders? I’m looking forward to the day when this piece of paper means absolutely nothing. The day when we are all free to roam anywhere and everywhere – no questions asked, no identity required. Just us humans… I want to be part of what’s happening here politically, I want to vote in the repeal referendum next year.”
That troubling quote is an outlier – the stories that make up NTTP are pretty banal. In many cases you feel deep sympathy for the subject, but in most cases, somewhat curiously, you don’t feel much of anything. The stories often lack the unique, telling detail you need to gain insight into someone’s situation and sympathy for it. They have the listless quality of a feature in a pro-immigration pamphlet that might get shoved into your hand as you walk down Grafton Street on a Saturday afternoon. (A telling detail in itself). Reading the individual articles leaves you shrugging, sure, why not? Why not let in whoever wants to be a citizen? What harm could it possibly do? But taken collectively, a feature of NTTP is that it leaves the questions about the impact of cultural and social change unaddressed, unanswered but also unasked. And that will mean trouble, sooner or later.
Consider the views expressed by the interviewees themselves. If a sense of community is one of the best things about Ireland, one of the things that makes Ireland liveable, what happens as traditionally Irish communities are enveloped by multiculturalism? Does Ireland have magic dirt that means that as soon as someone sets foot on our soil they acquire that communitarian sense, or is it carried in the heads and hearts of the people who have traditionally lived here, and to the extent they disappear, those values disappear with them? What happens if we admit people to the country who have no particular knowledge or interest in our history or habits, and no existing connection to the country, and are maybe even slightly contemptuous of the idea of nationhood itself, but intend to be fully active in social and political life from the get-go? Will they foster the same feelings in their kids? Is it OK that Irishness is not an idea or a feeling or a heritage but a document that any person can acquire and dispose of once the shelter it provided is no longer needed? Are Irish people happy with any of this? Because it never happened before, and now its happening faster here than anywhere else in western Europe.
This is a key problem for NTTP because the Irish Times is the Irish paper of record. It disseminates and in part creates the views of the Irish Executive Class. If it doesn’t get discussed in the Irish Times, it isn’t worth discussing, and certainly isn’t a problem. NTTP represents the entirety of the Irish Times coverage of the impact of cultural and social change as a result of immigration and multiculturalism. Please feel free to test that claim using Times website search function to identify any negative stories on the impact on Mass Immigration and Multiculturalism published in, oh, let’s say the last 3 years. I’ll wait. It’s a meagre crop. Implicitly, the Irish Times editorial line is that every story on this subject that must attempt to generate sympathy, preferably in the form of a personal anecdote. If not, it’s not going in the paper, and that’s that.
In that way NTTP is a symptomatic of the particular way the respectable media lies to its audience. Plenty of reasonable people on all parts of the political spectrum have been dismayed to see the rise of “Fake News” over the last 18 – 24 months. They have been equally dismayed to find that, not only is Fake News not the argument-ending silver bullet that they thought it was, but that it has been turned against the respectable media by the new media and its consumers. It genuinely never occurred to these people that their rhetorical weapon could be turned against them – but it has been. For the most part it’s not that the media is in the habit of telling you things that are verifiably untrue, although all media sources do that to some extent. They lie through positioning and emphasis. They select an aspect of the story that suits their purposes and their prejudices. They communicate that aspect of the story in the most sympathetic way. They exclude (preferably), dismiss, underplay or mischaracterise any aspect of the story that does not. In this way the questions go unaddressed, allowed to fester, and the problems are stored for future generations to deal with, or at least face.
The “Doomsday Clock” was recently set to two minutes to midnight, the closest it’s been since the Cold War. We’ll leave aside for a moment the fact that the setting of the clock is an arbitrary matter, and that in all likelihood it was merely another way for members of a particular class to roll their eyes at Donald Trump. Counting down to an avoidable future tragedy isn't a bad idea. Perhaps Ireland should have it’s own Doomsday Clock. Maybe we do have one, remorselessly counting down to disaster unbeknownst to the people who should be reporting on it.
The photo at the top of the page is of the crowd at the Irexit gathering over the last week. Did you see the pictures? What did you notice? I’ll tell you what I noticed – how many of the people in the crowd were young men. Is there a social force more powerful, more frightening and disruptive than a large group of dissatisfied young men? And what are they dissatisfied about? Mass immigration and cultural change. The same thing that people of their age across the western world are dissatisfied by. If these young men were American they’d have been at Charlottesville. If they were French or German or Swedish they’d be voting for FN or AfD of SD. If they were Polish they might have recently marched under a crucifix emblazoned banner on their national day. They are the submerged Irish arm of an international counterculture, and they mix with their German and Polish and American and Swedish and French counterparts on /Pol/ and TRS and Twitter and Reddit. Mainstream Irish politics has nothing to say to them. That’s a pretty big deal. So we turn to our paper of record and see… the serene platitudes of New to the Parish, and essentially nothing else. On the edge of Europe and the western world, we’ve so seen out the Populist/ Nationalist storm. The way we’re changing, and the speed at which it’s happening, it won’t stay like that forever. Does anyone else think we should talk about this stuff? Because you never know when you’re down to your last two minutes, and every moment we don’t talk about it, a clock counts down in secret… tick… tick… tick… tick…
